Welcome. It is great to see so many of our Coloplast friends here today. We've really been looking forward to this day, so a very big welcome from our side. Before we start the day, let me just give a few introductory remarks. We are here in Denmark again, and it's been quite a while since we had a full Capital Market Day in Denmark. The last full Capital Market Day we had in Denmark was in 2008. A lot of things have happened since 2008. The world has been through a financial crisis. Coloplast has been through a turnaround when it comes to profitability. In 2008, when we met in Denmark the last time, Coloplast had just gotten a new CEO.
Lars Rasmussen had just been appointed CEO for Coloplast. You had a chance to hear him talk about the strategy for the company. I trust that you will agree with me that we've actually come quite a long way since then. We met in the U.S. in 2009. We gave you a deep dive into how we were going to break the code in the U.S. and create really good growth. Admittedly, that was one of the projects that took a little bit longer time than what we had expected at the time. We did it. We are now there. You will hear more about that later today. We met up in Hungary in 2011.
That sort of marked the end of our work with transfer of production to Hungary and China, and you had a chance to hear about our global operations and their plans for how they were going to improve the gross margin. It was also the time where we had a full day when we talked about healthcare and healthcare reforms, and since then, we have been much more transparent on healthcare reforms than we were before. Finally, it was also in Hungary that we talked to you about how we were going to turn around our wound care business. Also, admittedly, that was another one of the projects that took a little bit longer than what we thought, but we managed it, and we're now into really nice, good growth territory for our wound care, and you will hear more about that later today.
In 2012, we met in London. 2012 was actually, to us, the year where we could say we have completed the cost turnaround for Coloplast. We are now in really good margin territory, and it's time to start investing in growth. We presented what we called our revised growth strategy for you. Since then, we have been investing in growth, and you have also seen the impact on our growth rates. That gives us the confidence today to talk to you more about how we are going to drive growth. Today, you'll get the chance to meet the team that Lars and I work with on a daily basis, the team that's going to take Coloplast to the next level. A lot of people have put a lot of effort into creating a good Capital Market Day.
I hope we are going to have a great day together and a great evening. Before we start with the first presentation, I would like to hand over to Senior Vice President, Anders Rantorp. Anders is heading up our people and communication areas, and he has promised to help us facilitate the day. Anders, will you take it from here?
Thank you, Lene.
Thank you.
Yes, I'm Anders Rantorp, heading the people and communications operations in Coloplast, and I'm, of course, honored to guide you through the program. The program, you have it in front of you at the tables, but it's also here. It's structured relatively simple. In the morning, you would have, say, the strategic direction and intents from Coloplast. Lars Rasmussen will kick it off with the strategic direction, followed by Oliver Johansen from R&D, talk about innovation and products, and Nicolas Nemery from Global Marketing that will talk about consumers, the ones where we wanna use our products.
Based on this kind of red strategic thread, the rest of the day will be about digging deeper into sales. We get perspectives and good nuggets from geographies and from business areas before we finalize with Lene coming back and give you a financial outlook based on what you have heard all the day. The format of this presentation would be approximately 20 minutes of presentation, followed by approximately 10 minutes of question and answers. You will have time to ask directly the presenter in this flow. There will also be breaks during the day, breaks long enough for you to go speak to the speakers and also speak to yourself if you want that. The breaks. Some of these breaks will carry food. I'll get back to some details with that.
I would also need to say restrooms. It's just in front of this room. You just need to go down the stairs. Outside here, we have a product exhibition. We have four booth from all the business areas: Ostomy, Continence, Urology Care, and Wound Care. At these booths, we will also have product specialists from Coloplast. They are present at all times at those booths, and they are here to talk to you, so please make use of them. We have also other competencies from Coloplast present today. We'll have public affairs, corporate strategy, legal, corporate finance, and market access. They will be around. If you can't find them, just ask me or some of the other Coloplast representatives, and go talk to them. Again, they are here in order to talk to you.
We will, you have a media present. They are in this table over there. We have done that at the other Capital Markets Day as well. Simon Mehl Augustesen is our Media Relations Manager. He will orchestrate their activities during the day. They have promised not to take quotes from the question and answer sessions and the presentations when you're here, and respect the nature of a Capital Markets Day. Apart from that, they are, of course, very interested in what is going on, so we also have an intense program. If any questions, just go ask Simon. Webcast. We have a camera. It's because we will do a webcast of the presentation today. It will be available tomorrow at noon, without the question and answer session, but carrying the presentations, so it will be available tomorrow. I think that was all.
This was about the formal program. Some of you, a lot of you, will also participate in the dinner tonight. I'll get back to some detail on that later. Welcome again. Let's hope that we're gonna have a very good day together, and let's kick it off. Lars Rasmussen, the CEO of Coloplast, would start it all off. Thank you.
Good morning. It's great to see you. I guess that you have all seen that we have issued a new long-term guidance, and we are going to talk a lot about that today, and you are going to get the opportunity to take a deep dive into how we think that we are going to deliver that. You're going to see all the people that are behind or the most important leaders that are behind this long-term ambition, and we are so excited to share it with you. What I'm going to do is to just give you kind of a high-level view on the activities that we have done and that we are about to do. Then, we'll take a much deeper dive into them, person by person, area by area.
If you look at the past performance, well, at least if we're looking at the EBIT margin, we think that we have done a pretty good job. We have always had good earnings in Coloplast, but, in recent years, we have actually taken it to a level where there are not many medtech companies that have better EBIT margins than what we have. It's been really good for investors, shareholders. We have created a lot of value over the last years also. I think a good question could be: All right, so was this all about saving money? Was this just a cost-cutting exercise? And no, it was not.
If we look at our engagement index in the company, we have actually done several of those over the last five years, and they have gone up every single year. We just completed the last one here last month, and people are engaged and motivated. We also it's quite fortunate that PatientView started to do their surveys as we started the turnaround of the company. Now we have the third survey that they did, and the patients like what we do. We are number one. We have done more than that. We have actually launched a lot of products in all of our areas. If we look at Continence Care, we launched last year, SpeediCath Compact Set. This year we did a revamp of our collecting devices.
We are launching a new Mio, SenSura Mio is a product range, what you see now is only the first part of a very large product range that we'll launch over the coming years. We have also launched ourselves into accessories. Accessories is today part of our total offering, and we are the one company with the largest single offering or the largest assortment in the market already now. We have launched a very good product in a product line in Wound Care with the Biatain Silicone. The Biatain Silicone is selling so well that we are unable to follow the demand.
Unfortunately, we don't get more capacity until later on this year, but it's been very well received, and we just finished the pilot of the pilot study on negative pressure, and we are ready to go and invest to build a position in that market. Finally, we have some of the best products in the female pelvic health available for the time being. We think that we have actually not just been cost cutting, we have also been investing. Investing more than what you see, because this is a picture of our new product pipeline. As you know, we're launching twice per year, and we are not going to reveal in the next click what each of the products are.
For each of the squares that we have up here, we have a project ongoing, and you can see the launch timing that we have up here. It is the best pipeline of new products that the company have ever had. We have also been investing in our sales force. We have invested a lot over the first years where we did the turnaround. We invested a lot in education. We invested a lot in segmentation and targeting. We have invested in a new backbone for the business, a new CRM system. From 2012, we started to invest in getting a bigger share of voice.
Just from 2012 to 2013, the headcount of salespeople in our organization went up by more than 10%. At that point in time, 2012, the capital markets day there, we said, we want to invest DKK 1 billion in extraordinary sales activities over the next five years. When we got started on that journey, it turned out that we could afford to invest more, or we could afford to invest faster. It also turned out that there were more business cases with positive outcome than what we have thought. We are actually going to invest the extra DKK 1 billion in just three years and not in five years.
That is what we are doing, so we are in the middle of that, on that, in that program, and the primary investment is in sales people. The 1 billion DKK is being invested in a number of areas. It's actually in all of our business areas. It's both in Urology Care, where we have some great products that we have invested in that you will see soon. It's, for example, in the in the negative pressure area in Wound Care. It's in emerging markets, particularly, we are investing a lot, for example, in dedicated sales forces in Brazil, but also in China, where we are building our, you know, a very, very strong sales force, and we have invested quite a bit in that.
We have invested in the U.S. to get on par with share of voice with our biggest competitors, it will come back to that later on. In Europe, we have also invested, even though we consider ourselves to be quite well invested in Europe. We have, for example, invested in a new sales force for Wound Care in France, more importantly, we have invested in our direct-to-consumer sales channel. We talked about that sales channel in 2012 for the first time. We were very cautious what we said at that point in time because we had just started building that channel. Today, we are going to talk much more about it, Nicolas will share that with you.
We consider this to be a very, very important strategic decision. It is a decision that will be defining for the company. We used to be a business-to-business company, and with this move, we also become a business-to-consumer company, and that's a very different animal than just a business-to-business company. Our ambition is to reach out to 1 million consumers in Europe and in the U.S. That's approximately half of all existing users in those geographical areas. Not only Coloplast users, it's half of all users that are there. You could ask the question: Why? Why would we want to do that?
Because we always say that once people are using an ostomy product, they are very, very hard to convert, and that's true, but there's much more to our business than just bags and plates. Most users are also using accessories, whether they're using a Coloplast bag and plate or a competitor bag and plate, they're using accessories, they could as well buy them with us. We need a channel to sell them in, and one of the reasons why our Brava range got such a huge or such a fast take-up was because we have this channel to sell in. We also have to mention another area, we have the best technologies by far when it comes to catheters. Once people have seen and tried a SpeediCath product, they don't want to go back.
This channel is dedicated for Ostomy Care and for Continence Care. Just to mention an example of what we can do with this, then in the U.S., as you all know, we are upgrading the market from old-fashioned technologies to the SpeediCath technology, and we do that by utilizing this channel. You're also going to hear about a very, very successful story for Ostomy Care in the U.S., and that is also very much down to our consumer care setup and the Care program that we are running in the U.S. That's that's part of why we're doing this. Another part is we are the innovator.
It's not all of distribution that thinks that it's great, that Coloplast is bringing products to the market that are new and more expensive, seen from their point of view. They may make less money on new products, and this market is today intransparent. We want to make the market transparent. We want to give people an opportunity to get the best possible products for the reimbursement that is available already. This is also about awareness. We'll talk much more about that, and we had the 1 million consumers in our minds when we talked about it in 2012, and we are close enough now that we dare to put it out there as so that everybody can see that that is our goal.
The strategy that we talk about today is not a new strategy. It is actually a continuation of the strategy that we set in motion back in 2012. It is a growth strategy that we talk about. What we invest in and have been invested in is what I have just talked to you about, is the new products. It's the consumer journey, it's to invest in sales pressure and in an efficient setup. It's actually within all of our business areas. You could then ask, "Okay, then what about the future then? Where are you going to invest in the future?" We are going to invest much more in direct-to-consumer.
The DKK 1 billion that we talk about, you know, when that comes to an end, it doesn't mean that we stop investing. We actually see opportunities to keep investing. One of the areas would be direct-to-consumer, still in Europe, where we are still not where we want to be, but also in emerging markets. Emerging markets, of course, is a place where the direct-to-consumer strategy and the whole competency that we have developed will be as it will be as useful to us as it is in the more mature markets. We will invest to capture what we consider to be a fair share. That goes across all of our business areas.
We still have also areas in Europe, despite the fact we have a high market share, we still have areas in Europe where we have pockets of opportunities. We have a lot to a very big gap to close in Ostomy in the U.S. When it comes to Wound Care and Urology Care, there's a lot of market shares to go for, and we can do that in a profitable sense. Emerging markets is, as I said, a very big investment area to us, and we see plenty of opportunities to invest more, and Kristian will come back to that in his speech.
But some of the markets that we are invested in already in the emerging markets, for example, China, will start to have real impact on our growth numbers and also on profitability in this three-five year period that we are talking about now. Finally, as you know, we consider wound care to be doing much better, but we are subscale, and as we grow, that business will also become more profitable in that business. We will do what we can to expand wound care also. All of these activities that we have done, and the activities that we can see that we can do in the next three-five years, is the basis for. They form the basis for our new long-term guidance.
On the revenue side, our new guidance is to grow in the range of 7% to 10% per year. That is, in a market growing 4% to 5%, it means that we have to be very, very competitive in order to almost outgrow the market by a Factor 2. We think that we have a unique setup at this point in time. We have very, very strong commercial processes and a fantastic product pipeline and a strong team, we feel confident we can deliver on this. At the same point in time, we also think that we can deliver 50% to 100% improvement on the EBIT line per year. What you have to understand here is that we keep investing in top-line growth.
We don't stop after the 1 billion, because then the EBIT line expansion would probably be stronger, and the top-line growth would probably be less bullish. We see an opportunity to keep a high growth and still improve the EBIT from a very high level, and we consider that to be quite solid. We think that this, what we're talking about here is that we are talking about a permanent shift in growth rate for the company. We used to be around 6%, we are upping it from here. All in all, we think that our mission of being close to our customers and bringing new products to the market, gives us an opportunity to accelerate the growth. Thank you very much.
All right. That was smooth. Now, continuing this in-depth strategic direction, a part of today, Oliver Johansen is SVP of Research and Development, and will talk to you about products and innovation in Coloplast. Please, Oliver.
Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. My name is Oliver Johansen, and I'm thrilled to be heading up R&D, because as Lars mentioned, new products is a key driver for future growth. It's also a job that requires close collaboration with the manufacturing and commercial part of the organization, where I actually have several years of Coloplast experience within these areas. I've been heading up our international manufacturing sites in China and Hungary, which produces 85% of all we make. I've been heading up our subsidiary in Italy, driving the local sales and marketing activities. I understand the challenges and the language of my key collaboration partners in manufacturing and the commercial part, which I believe is a benefit.
I would actually like by start giving you an overview of the transformation that we've gone through with our research and development function in recent years. It basically started in 2006, where we went from a decentral organization organized in product divisions to establishing global functions for operations, R&D, and marketing. We did this to achieve economy of scale, but also to increase our capabilities. The phase II for us was to increase our innovation ambition through our Bigger, Better, Bolder journey, which I believe most of you have heard about. I'll just like to explain those two phases in a bit more detail.
The situation in 2006 was that our R&D efforts lacked from clear focus and also, in many ways, from capabilities. We had too many range care activities with too little impact, when we looked at the pipeline at that point, measured in NPV and in incremental revenue, it was basically insufficient. We also experienced long lead times on our development projects, our response to this was to establish one global research and development function for Ostomy Care, Continence Care, and Wound Care. It was also during this period where we established what we call innovation manufacturing sites. We also call them technical competence centers, and I believe some of you yesterday visited one of them in Måløv, just north of here.
The role of these sites is basically to collaborate with research and development on developing new products, developing new production processes, to do the ramp-up for global launches, and after the launch, to optimize and mature the production before we move it to one of our volume sites in Hungary and China, where we can produce at a much lower cost. That was a quick summary of the phase I. If we then look at the phase II, that's our Bigger, Better, Bolder journey. That was very much about focus. It was very much about zooming in on a few innovation projects that had a much greater commercial impact. It was also a period where we established competence centers across the different business areas, so you're no longer a R&D scientist in Continence Care.
You're, for example, a mechanical engineer in a mechanical engineering group working across VAs. It's also a period where we significantly strengthened some of our key competencies to develop new products. For example, product design, mechanical construction, and injection molding to support the new ambition. Finally, as Lars mentioned, we have defined two launch slots a year, one in the spring and one in the fall, and during this period, we have significantly improved the commercial execution of our launches. All this, giving us an excellent outset for driving future growth. During this period, we're also a company, growing on average 6%, in a market growing 4%-5%.
As Lars just mentioned, the new guidance has been lifted upwards, and we want new products to play a much greater part driving growth in the future through innovation excellence. Let me just explain what we mean by innovation excellence. For us, it means managing and delivering the best pipeline ever, as Lars mentioned. That means delivering the new products on time and according to the plan. It also means increasing the value for every launch that we do. The second must-win battle for us is actually to ensure a proper value upgrade of the new innovations that we bring to market. There is an increasing pressure on healthcare spending, and there will be an increasing pressure to deliver evidence of the improvements that we bring by launching new products.
We will, in the future, be much more ambitious to deliver this evidence and to ensure the prices that reflect the added value that we bring with our new products, and I will come back to this in a little bit. The third must-win battle for us is to continue the journey to develop consumer-oriented products. That is to support the consumer journey that Lars mentioned, but it's also to clearly differentiate ourselves towards competitors. Now, a simple example of this is I know it's a big crowd in here, so it's probably hard to see, but what I have here is called a EasiCath Set. It's basically a product used for emptying your bladder. It consists of a catheter, a water ampoule to activate the coating, and a urine bag.
It's a traditional hospital-like, medical-like looking product. It's bulky, it's even noisy, and you actually have to go through a number of not very intuitive steps to use the products. When I talk today about consumer-oriented design, it's actually to do the exact opposite. An example of this is the latest Compact Set launch, which is basically a product that does the same thing as this one. It's just much more discreet, it's not so noisy, and it's very easy and intuitive to use, and you have to go through a much smaller number of steps to use the product. This is an example of what we mean when we talk consumer-oriented design. There's a lot of things here. All right.
The rest of my presentation will focus on these three themes, and I will explain those themes for us in a bit more detail. The first one about delivering the best pipeline ever. What is it that we're doing to ensure this? This is an overview of the innovation process in Coloplast. On the very left-hand side, I have my partners in crime in marketing, that dreams up all the requirements that the new products need to deliver. On the right-hand side, I have global operations, who basically want simple products that are simple to produce at the lowest overall cost. My job is to translate the business requirements and the user requirements into something which can be manufactured in large scale volumes.
If we look at the right-hand side, the actual product development phase, that is a structured process, which has been known and used for Coloplast for many, many years, actually, since the nineties. It's an area where we first develop a few product concepts. We mature them, we verify that the product actually works, and this is where we finalize the specifications of the product. It's where we finalize the manufacturing process specifications. We bring forward new equipment for producing the products. We do clinical studies, and we ramp up the production for the global launches. During this process, this is where the innovation manufacturing sites have played a key role in improving our capability to do ramp-up of new products for global launches.
The challenge we've had in the past with this process is, when we have started up a project like this, it involves a lot of resources. We allocate a lot of resources to it. We do significant investments in machinery. The outset of such a project is hugely important. What we're doing differently now is we want to be more specific on what is it that we are initiating. That's what we call the front-end innovation process. That's a process where the outset is a product roadmap of future launches, and for each launch, we define a innovation challenge. What we do different now is that we work in smaller teams, and we front load with R&D specialists to make sure that we have a very firm and clear concept direction.
That we understand what's technically feasible before we start up the actual development project. We do this to significantly increase the hit rate of our innovation projects, and we also do it to reduce the lead time of these development projects. A key for us is that we do not want to mix technology development with product development. Technology development could be a new coding system, a new adhesive systems, or something similar. Whenever starting up a product development project, you need to have the technologies ready. You cannot mix the two, because otherwise you prolong the development time significantly. To the very left, compared to how we've done things in the past, we are very market-driven when defining the value proposition, i.e., what customer segments are we addressing? What needs do we need to deliver on in the future years?
That's basically what is driving the portfolio of projects. That was just a brief overview of how we will manage and deliver the best pipeline ever. Our next topic for us is. As I mentioned, there is an increasing pressure on healthcare spending, we believe that we need to be better at showing the evidence of the improvements that the product that we bring to market have. We actually believe that we can both improve the quality of life for our users, as well as reduce the overall cost of chronic care management. There's actually studies that confirm our beliefs. We have 1 study showing a 28% increase of quality of life when using our compact catheters, and we have another study showing a 40% reduction of treatment cost when using high-quality stoma appliances.
For us, that means that very early in the development projects, we need to consider the appropriate pricing strategy for each project, which is different compared to what we've done in the past. If you consider on one side, the product performance and evidence level, and on the other side, the willingness to pay, there's basically two options that we consider. One is a parity pricing approach, which basically means within a given reimbursement category, we go for a similar price or a marginal price increase when launching a new product. It's an approach that has a lower cost or lower risk. You get your products to market faster to fight the market share fight, but it also has a lower long-term value. The alternative approach is that you can clinically document improvements, improvement in quality of life.
It could be lower cost of treatment, or with an ostomy, it could be to improve the skin conditions or to reduce leakage. If you can clinically document that, the willingness to pay, of course, goes up. It's an approach that has a higher risk, it also has a higher cost, and it can also prolong the development time, but it offers a much higher value long-term. Historically, Coloplast has very much pursued a parity pricing approach, in the future, we will consider both, we will actually, uh... At the moment, in our pipeline, we have a number of projects that are pursuing a premium price approach, to reflect the added value that we see that we bring to market. It's also a area that requires technology development.... Let me just give you an example.
90% of all users, of all people with an ostomy, they actually worry about leakage. Leakage for an ostomate is actually quite critical. It means that you get output from your intestines onto the cloth, which of course, most people would like to avoid. It dramatically impacts how people live, what kind of social activities they engage in. It impacts what kind of clothes they wear, what kind of travels they plan. If you really want to reduce leakage, you need to invest in technology development. That's a key area for us, is to make sure that we can document the performance of our products. Let me give you another example. 43% of all people using an ostomy bag, they actually experience sleep disruptions during the night.
Actually, 41%, they experience sleep disruption several times during the night. What happens is, basically, when you have such a bag, it contains a carbon filter, which basically lets the air, the gas out of the intestines, and it also reduces the odor. What happens with most solutions in the market today, is that it clogs very quickly after a while, causing the bag to balloon. Now, the result is it can pop off, and you have a dramatic leakage on your clothes, on your bed when you sleep. Let's hear how our latest, SenSura Mio, have addressed this challenge.
We realized in this project that the challenge we had to solve was to construct a pre-filter that protects the carbon and membrane, because those two parts are very vulnerable to feces. Basically, this meant we had to start from scratch. We had to look at all the components in our filter: the membrane, the carbon, and then the pre-filter. By having an almost full circle grid pre-filter, we can postpone clogging of the filter for so long that you will change the bag due to hygiene or other reasons than ballooning. The new filter reduced ballooning by 61%, and we get some fantastic comments back from our users, like, "Now I've been able to sleep through the night for the first time in 10 years.
Isn't it amazing how innovation can impact people life? Personally, that what makes it so great for me to work in Coloplast, because we can really make a big difference for our users, this is one example. It's also an example of a launch that we are very proud of. It's actually our largest launch ever, it's actually a groundbreaking product portfolio because we both combine a complete new consumer-oriented design, it also includes significant improvements in the basic functionality of the product. Let me give you a few examples. We have developed a new baseplate, which contains an elastic adhesives, which basically means it can fit most body shapes. It's flexible and elastic, which also means that it can follow the body movements during the day.
What that provides the users with, is a more secure fit throughout the day and a better feeling of security. We have also introduced a 100% textile, which is completely new in our industry. Normally, we're talking plastic foils. This is much more resembles a clothing. We've chosen the color neutral, gray color among hundreds to make the product as discreet as possible, even under a white shirt. The carbon filter you heard about in the video significantly reduces ballooning by 61%. We've also, for the two-piece version, where you have a baseplate on your stomach, and you can apply the bag separately, we have a new wave-shaped coupling system, which ensures that the user experience the same appliance every time they use the product for better security.
This is a product portfolio which we are very proud of, and this will be key in driving ostomy growth in the coming years. Now, I'm very excited and very honored to do the first official announcement of our latest launch. You're actually the first guys to hear about it. It's our SpeediCath Compact Eve launch. It's a compact catheter for women, which contains several new key features. First of all, we believe it's a great step on our consumer-oriented design journey. It's very discreet, it's very feminine. If you put it on the table and you're not a catheter user, it will be difficult to see what it is. It resembles more like something from the cosmetic industry than a traditional catheter. It has a triangular shape for better grip and better handling.
It also makes sure that the product is more stable on uneven surfaces. It has a one-step opening, and securing, resealing, and, as our other catheters, it is ready for instant use, and it has a urine bag connector, which the current product doesn't have. I can just encourage all of you to visit the booth outside to get more insights on this new great product. We will be doing pre-trials of this product in the coming weeks and months, and it will be ready for launch by 1st of October, fulfilling the launch rhythm, the last mentioned, that we have major launches hitting our sales subsidiaries every six months. I hope this gave you a overview of the transformation that we've gone through within R&D.
I also hope it gave you a flavor for how innovation excellence will support our new growth ambition. We believe that R&D is in the best shape ever to fuel this new sales ambition that Lars has presented today. Thank you very much.
Now on to the consumer and insights on the consumer journey. Nicolas is SVP of Global Marketing and would take us through that.
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much for showing up. We know we compete for your attention, and we hope we'll make it worth your while. As Oliver was saying, we are very proud of our pipeline. We're very excited about it, and I can tell you, so are the consumers when they get exposed to it. Once they get a choice, they prefer our products by far. There were some questions about competition. I see it a little bit like a caterpillar. It's, we're trying to innovate and move ahead on the differentiation. They try and catch up, but as you know, the back end never really catches up, and that's how we intend to keep it.
It's also very much, you say, in the times, because the times are about choice, about people having a choice, about people in healthcare actually choosing how to get treated, looking up information, and being much more active. It's no longer just about the healthcare provider, but it's also about the patients, the consumers, as we call them. However, what if they never get a choice? That's what keeps us up at night. What if there's somebody in between us who are trying to drive the innovation of this business and the people that are actually benefiting from it? What if they don't have the same interest as the consumers? That's, of course, what we've been trying to address over the past few years.
We have invested, we have worked to see how we can approach the consumer, how we can make sure that they have the choice. We have tried to see if we can make this scalable, because as you've heard many times, we also think there's a lot of where people are basically not switching a lot in our industry. Are they really interested in engaging with us, and can we do this in a profitable way? Because, of course, we don't want to sacrifice our margins in doing so. We've been invested. We haven't been talking so much about it.
You can say it's been the secret ingredient. If it was up to me, I would have kept it secret a little bit longer because, of course, we don't want competition to get too excited about this. Unfortunately, Ian is telling me he's having a hard time explaining our story without this component. Here we go. Why are we doing this? We have basically a line of exciting new products. We have the best products in the industry, and we have more to come. This is like yin and yang. Again, back to can competition do this? Well, it actually starts with the products that appeal to people, so they want to engage with you. We have that. We want to expose that to people.
Between us and the people using our products, we have some intermediaries that don't always expose the latest, the best, to the consumers. It can be the healthcare provider, just for lack of time. Typically, it doesn't cost the system more, but typically, they are also very pressed for time, and the people they discharged 10 years ago, they don't even know where they are now, so they can't approach them. We have distribution, which may again also have joint interests with us, but they sometimes also have other interests, of course. We want to make sure that they're not making the choice on behalf of the patients, on behalf of the consumers. Once the consumers then have chosen us, we of course, need to make sure they have success.
We think our products are very intuitive, but for somebody who's never used it's not always so. We need to help them make sure that it works for them. We need to help them make sure once they transition from the hospital to their home, that they actually have something that works in that environment. Sometimes very little things can make a big difference as to whether they actually have a leakage or not. May not be the product, may be the way you put it on, may be the way you clean your skin or whatever it is. Some very practical questions, we say, sometimes don't dare go back to the nurse and ask about because she's so busy or the hospital is far away or whatever it is. When we reach out to them, we ensure success for them.
That's the rationale for what we're doing. I'll be explaining a little bit about what it is, so practically, what are we doing, and then some of the outcomes. First, we have two, basically two pillars of this approach. We have what we call Care, which is basically a program we offer to people once they come out of the hospital, to make sure they come home and have success. It's very much a retention program, so the people that have gotten our products, that we work with them to make sure that it still works once they're in their normal environment. Could also be that they need additional products to help it work for them, or maybe it just doesn't work, and they need a different product.
We do accept competitors into the program, but it's very much about retention and upgrading the experience for people. We have direct to consumer. That's for all those people that we did not talk to in the first place. How do we reach out to people who were discharged maybe 20 years ago and make sure they know that there's a better offering? If we take them one by one, Coloplast Care, as I said, is really a hospital program, so that's something we offer typically through the nurse to the patient to make sure they know how to deal with their product, with their whatever condition they have once they get home. Historically, the industry has been doing things in this space. We've been doing things, competition's been doing things, starting with simple discharge kits.
Basically sending a bunch of materials, some samples that people could take home and read on their own. Some years ago, this evolved into what we've had as the Care for the past few years, where we also reach out to people. We call them and ask: How's it going, and do you know where you get your products? Stuff like that. A bit more tailored. Under that scheme, we now have more than 300,000 people that are in our program around the world. We have 19 and counting countries, and we are seeing impact. We are seeing that people, of course, stay more loyal to us, and to a large extent, when competitors enroll, they also find out what's best for them. It's pre-programmed. It's not as modern.
It's standard information based on what the average person needs. It's calls that are scheduled when we think it's suitable. We don't think that's enough. We have now launched a new version, which we call Care 2.0. Launched in the U.S. in January, which is much more triggered, so it's also interactive. It's based, of course, on an online flow of people letting us know how they feel, how it's working out for them. We still reach out and call them, but it's as much when they are looking for information, or when they respond to what we offer them, that we get back to them. If there are signals that it's not working for them. We have expanded it, so we actually go in pre-surgery.
Once they know they have a condition that will lead to a surgery, we make sure that they get educated, and of course, they get comfortable because it's a life-changing experience. It doesn't have to be life-ending. That's care. The direct to consumer is basically about reaching out to the people that have been discharged a while back, that we didn't talk to in the first place, and making sure they know what's out there. It's reaching people through various channels. Can be online, can be through meetings of consumers, it can be through advertising, other ways. Make sure that they know what's there, offering them to enroll in a care program or a care-like program, so they get the service from us.
Then, of course, see if they're interested in other products, in upgrading their products, in using accessories, if that is, or converting, of course, if they are competitors. We've now seen a lot of impact of this. We see a lot of impact in the sales numbers, that's why Ian is telling me we need to tell you about it. We have also spent a bit of money, of course, this is also part of the investment that Lars is talking about. Let me just explain briefly what it is that we're doing and why is it costing us this money. We have spent to upgrade our web presence, both so that our websites are look nice and accessible when you're on a mobile.
To make sure that they're nice and accessible for Google, so when you search. To make sure that once you come in, you don't necessarily go in through the investor side. I know that's what you guys are interested in, but other people, they typically like to go for the information they actually search for, instead of coming in through a corporate portal. That's been part of what we've been doing. We've been hiring expertise. In the past few years, we've hired people that have been running so airlines, loyalty programs, insurance, telco. People have been doing a lot more on both user direct marketing, call center management, stuff like that. We have built up a string of call centers.
We very much believe in the personal touch, and basically, we also often give people a chance to meet the person they have on the phone. So it's each country their own. We don't have a big call center in India or Ireland. That has taken some time. And also making sure, of course, that we get efficiency into this, because as I said, we still wanna make sure that we add to the bottom line. On the systems, we have invested in the CRM system. As was said before, we have the CRM that was developed for the Salesforce. We have built on that, and we have, of course, had to pay a little bit extra to get the consumer modules working for us.
We've built a campaign management system on top and various other, smaller systems. Finally, we are investing heavily in lead generation. As I said, through various means, can be online, can be physical meetings, can be advertising. We have one example here, which is from France. This is running in France right now. As Lars was saying, we have been advertising or some of our partners have been advertising on our behalf in the U.S. We're doing more also and getting more appetite for it in Europe. I said, that's all nice and dandy, but you're here to look for results, right? Is it working? We think it works very well. These are some examples of what the users are saying.
Very often, as I said, little things make a big difference. Little things such as what's the order in which you put things on, or how do you prepare for making a change, and stuff like that. Could be silly, but it makes a difference if people have success or not. Can also be bigger things, but of course, we cannot become their nurse or their healthcare provider. When we get to that point, we need to send them to whatever nurse or whoever they are working with. We get so much good feedback. What's interesting here is a quote actually from a guy we hired from the insurance industry. Not to bash insurance, but as when asked what's the difference between working at Coloplast and calling the people there versus where you came from?
His comment was, "Well, here they thank us when the conversation's over." People really appreciate it. I know you guys are mostly into numbers, say that's very nice and sweet, warms my heart. What about my wallet? We also have a little bit for the wallet. We're just not gonna give you the numbers. If you take Brava, you've heard about Brava, you've heard about, what Brava has added to our development in the past few years, and this has very much been through this channel. A lot of people that use Brava, they start doing it after they've been discharged. So when they come home and they have issues, working with the product, and we've been there for them, and that's why Brava is pulling quite nicely, in our numbers. Our new products, very appealing.
When people get a choice between this and what competition has, it's very easy. We just need to expose it to them. The whole direct to consumer is a pivotal part of the launch approaches that we have right now. You can say that's also where you have innovation and the consumer approach as a yin and yang, because, of course, somebody else can advertise, various products, but if they don't appeal, if they look medical, they're not gonna get the reaction. We even see that in our own portfolio because, of course, some of our own products are more intuitive, than others, more appealing, basically.
When we look at the results and the early results from Mio that we see already now, the appeal it has amongst consumers, when we look at the penetration of the SpeediCath Compact Set, we can clearly see an impact from the whole consumer approach that we are taking right now. You could say, what about distribution? Are they gonna be upset? Some are, but we actually try to approach it like Lars was saying, that they have a certain role, we have a certain role. If they want to partner, we want to partner. We actually see a lot of examples of this, where they realize that we are actually better at driving business for them, that we are better at giving people a good experience.
We even had examples of them giving us their databases under certain rules and regulations that we have to comply with, of course, and saying, "Why don't you try and approach these people, see if they want to upgrade?" Vice versa, we help them make campaigns to their consumers, because at the end of the day, we actually think that we are, you can say, expanding the pie by giving people a better experience, by having products that work for them. They will become not just satisfied, but there may also be a tendency that they use somewhat more products. We think it's actually a win-win, if we can get the dealers, the distributors that we work with to see it the same way, we think it works the best. That's basically the results in words.
Sorry, not to give you numbers. What's next for us? We're pretty excited about this and think this will be a key part of the journey going forward, as Lars was saying, that we'll think this through our whole system. We are still early in the journey, so we still have to fine-tune. I think we're still using some crude tools in terms of how we actually approach the consumers. We still need to get scale in a lot more countries. What you've seen here is mostly Europe and North America, but there's a lot more places where we wanna take this approach. We're trying to expand the scope. Be it social media, being other channels that we are trying to experiment with to see how we can do it.
With the mantra, we want scale, and we still want the returns, that we make sure that it is a profitable approach to us. As part of that, we actually, we are a preferred partner with Google, as I guess means we spend enough money with them. We basically had a meeting with some of their senior managers last week, and they were sort of pushing us and saying, "Why don't you should be more active on the social media?" When we discussed last week. We had to retort and say, "Yeah, but we don't wanna go to low involvement, right? We're actually talking to our consumers." We have real people talking to real people, and we think that's the strength in the future.
It also means that it'll be very tough because we're ahead. We probably are not gonna have consumers talk to too many competitors at the same time. We think we have a chance of locking dow n. That's basically how we see it for the future. We think it's promising. Sorry we didn't talk so much about it before, but we didn't want to give other people too many good ideas.
Hi, good afternoon, you now have the time slot that is always the worst. It's just after lunch. Europe is a very nice region, and I'm sure I'm going to keep you awake. Let's start. Some background about Europe. Europe, Western Europe is about 13 countries, going from the Nordics to the South, Italy, Spain. Europe are mature markets. We have 40%-50% market shares. There is a bit less than 13,000 employees there. The good thing about Europe is that if you look at the Chronic Care market, we are evenly distributed between Ostomy Care and Continence Care. As it was mentioned this morning, our Chronic Care, and in general, our market in Europe represents more than 60% of the total sales of Coloplast.
Europe, historically, Coloplast started there, and we still have a big chunk of our business there. It's big, we generate incremental cash flow. The good news is, we have been able to do that for years, but we can still continue to do that. There are three key message that I would like, you know, you to take home. One, in Europe, we still have commercial potential. We have pocket of growth, and we will continue to grow. Two, is that in Europe, we have an organization that is very lean. Not only we will be able to grow, but it would be profitable growth. When you combine these two, you know, we generate incremental growth, cash flow, and that will fuel, you know, the growth globally. That's what we have been doing, and that's what we will continue to do.
Let me give you a bit of background as well about, you know, the trends in Europe, the issues that we are facing. There are three things that we are dealing with. One is the reimbursement reforms. Europe, for years, has been under pressure when it comes to price. Two is the distribution consolidation that we are seeing coming. More and more, the distributor are becoming, you know, global. We are in a mature market, so the growth is pretty stable in Europe. We do have some way to address that, and that's why we're confident that we will continue to grow and continue to make profits. That's what I'm going to go through now and explain how we are going to address those trends, those issues. Reimbursement, price.
I mean, since I've been working, you know, in Coloplast, when I started in France, pricing has always been an issue. Reimbursement, always. There is always pressure. The governments always want to reduce the reimbursement, you know, we have always been able to mitigate that. Today, we can see that some countries are under pressure. France, for instance, last year, we had a price decrease, a price cut, of 5%. Half of it, we managed to make sure that the trade was supported, so we had a price decrease of 2.5 for Coloplast. Holland, there is things coming. We know that we will be under pressure. It's not only that.
Sometimes you would get new products, and you would like these products to be reimbursed, but the government would say, "Well, we need maybe more proof, and for the time being, you can't get it." Like, for instance, we don't have a reimbursement for SpeediCath Compact Set in Denmark, and we had some issues in Belgium as well to get it. We do have a toolbox to mitigate all these issues. First of all, we have public affairs that will, you know, work with the authorities, work with the association, like Eucomed, and try to avoid the pressure that we are getting from the governments. When we are facing some issues, we have as well market access that is working with the subsidiary to develop some processes on how we could improve our average selling price.
We had, for instance, two, three years ago, a global pricing projects, where we really worked in details and analyzed, you know, how the price was distributed. By doing so, we were able, in Europe, to increase, you know, ASP by a couple of points, by understanding the way the price was distributed, by making sure that we are making the right decision and squeezing some distributors. We do have the toolbox. We have these issues, but we know how to deal with it. We are not saying this is not important. Of course it is, but we know how to deal with it. There is the other trends that we see, and as I mentioned to you, is the distribution. Again, when I started in Europe, well, 10 years ago, the distribution, it was very local for local.
In the U.S., you know, sometimes they say it's mom-and-pop shops, so it was not very well organized. They were not global at all, and it was easier to deal with them than it is today. What we are seeing now is a trend where the distribution is becoming more global. If I take an example, Mediq, that I'm sure you have heard of, that is a Dutch-based company, is now present in five countries in Europe. They have bought, you know, their entrance in Germany lately by acquiring Mediq. We can see that this is a trend that has started. This is something we have seen in the U.S. many years ago, and it's coming to Europe. What does it mean for Coloplast? I mean, to have this, you know, distributor are consolidating. Well, they are getting scale....
It means that they are increasing their buying, you know, process, and they are trying to bargain more with a company like us. The bargaining power is increased, but what do we do about it? You have seen this morning that we have great innovations, and we have some products that are very, very key, that are difficult to bypass. Innovation is very important for Coloplast, and then for the distributors, if they want to have an attractive product portfolio for the consumer, it's very difficult for us to bypass Coloplast. The other measure that we have taken, and has been explained by Nicolas this morning, is that we are heavily investing in consumer marketing. Consumer marketing is important for us. We are investing online and offline.
Online is the, you know, all the AdWords that we are doing with Google. We have websites, and we are getting access to the patient. We are exposing them to our products for solutions, and that's very important because once they see that, they want it. We have offline, Coloplast Care. I'm not going to go back to that. It has been explained to you. We have as well, you know, a consumer event where our sales force is meeting consumers, creating events locally and exposing them with our products. It works very well. We do know that when we put products on the table, and we put the competitive products, as with Coloplast, a lot of patients, and the majority of them, will choose Coloplast.
By doing that, we're exposing them to the solution and making sure that when they have the choice, they will pick Coloplast. The other measure that we have is home care companies. We have a home care company in the U.K. and one in Germany, and we control the supply chain there, and it works very well. Europe is, you know, a market where the growth is stable. We are growing 3%-4%, the market. Three in ostomy, four, average four on Continence Care. Coloplast, in the last few years, have been able to outgrow that market. We are growing more or less twice the speed of that market. We are growing at around five in ostomy, six in Continence Care. Despite the fact that we have high market shares, we know we can continue and can really outperform that market.
How are we going to do that? Well, we have, again, very innovative products. If you look at the left corner here, we have a new SenSura Mio. I believe that some of you had the chance to go on the booth and look at the products. You know, that product range is a breakthrough. It's very, very nice products. In fact, we have started to launch and pre-launch in Europe, and the feedback that we are getting from the consumer and from the caregivers is extremely good. This is something new. This is something that hasn't been developed before.
We had a conference in Europe where it was exposed, not only to the nurses, but the competition was there, some competitors came to our booth and explained that, "That's the 1st time we have seen that," said, "Whoa! Now you talk." That was the expression. "That is going to be difficult for us. This is a breakthrough." In ostomy, we are very confident that we have a new product portfolio that is going to help us to grow in Europe. It's not only ostomy. On IC, intermittent catheterization, you have the compact set, for instance, that has been presented to you, which is a very nice, neat product.
If you take a country like France, where we have very, very high market share, it's above 60, you could say, when you have that kind of market share, how can you continue to grow and take points, you know, market points? That has been launched a year ago. It's working very well, and we are regaining growth in that segment, and we are taking market shares. Product innovations is key for Europe and is working very well. You have seen that we have a new product coming on the female segment, on Eve. We do know that we are going to get sustainable growth in the coming years. How can we get further growth? We have Peristeen. That is a segment that we are developing. Prior to Coloplast, it was not real solutions there.
We have developed a product that corresponds to the needs of those patients, and every time, you know, we penetrate that market, it's added sales for us. This product is reimbursed in many countries, and as we speak, we are penetrating very nicely this market. That's source of growth as well. There is areas where there is a market, we are not developing it, but where Coloplast was not that active, is the accessories in ostomy. This market is a pretty good size, and we have developed, you know, a product portfolio that really address the needs. Here, again, we are growing very fast and taking market shares in that segment.
In a nutshell, you know, we have new products that are helping us to secure and grow our business, we are attacking new segments, we are developing products in order to penetrate those where we were weak. The third things that is going to help us to really grow, is what we call the untapped potential. Here you have real numbers, it's real countries with real numbers that are not on the slide, it's a real scale. What you see is that some countries have high market shares, when others, on segments on countries, have got lower. It means that there is pocket of growth. I'll give you an example. U.K. U.K. is a very highly profitable market in ostomy. U.K. has got a market share that is about 10% less than the average in Europe.
The competitors that are in U.K. are very similar to the one we see in the rest of Europe. We have been able, in the rest of Europe, to have a market share between 40%-50%. By developing the right strategies, by allocating the right resources, and by executing them properly, there is no reason why we can't grow our market share in the U.K. and bring the U.K. subsidiary to the same market share as the rest of Europe. That's a massive pocket of growth. Another example, Germany, but this time is not in ostomy. It's not the ostomy market that we're talking about, but it's the IC, intermittent catheterization. In Germany, similarly than the U.K., we have a market share that is 10% lower than the average in Europe.
We are going to do exactly the same, develop the right strategies, allocate the right resources, focus on things that makes different and execute. These are two major market in Europe and two major markets for Coloplast. By succeeding to bring these two countries to a level that is the average in Europe, we will see a nice growth. You can see that I gave you example for two markets, but there is more there. You could ask, "What are you going to do with the one that are very high?" Well, the new products that we are bringing, you know, the new Mio, Eve, will address that. There is a lot of patients that are using products that are not state-of-the-art, that we can convert and bring to Coloplast while they are exposed to these products.
Consumer care, consumer event, they will be exposed, and when they are exposed, that's the products they want. Region Europe, we have significant untapped potential. Growth, of course, is important, but it has to be profitable. When you look at this slide, you can see that we have a lean, efficient, and scalable machine in Europe. Few years ago, we were looking at the way we were operating in Europe, and then it was very clear that we had subsidiaries that were operating okay, but they were acting like small kingdoms. Every subsidiary had its own org chart. Every subsidiary had its own way to address the market, and it was a kind of disconnection between the corporate, you know, decisions and the way it was executed locally.
They were tending to reinvent the wheel, they had, in a way, a quite fat organization, because they had to redo what was already done, and they had to redo it in the way they wanted to do it, which was not always the most efficient way. We decided to work on that and harmonize the way we're structured in Europe, in general, in the world. That's what we call the chronic care country model. In fact, I was the person appointed to work on that, and what we did is we developed a structure, an organization, that allow the subsidiary to execute on what has been decided at a corporate level, but not to reinvent what has been already decided. By doing that, we reduced the number of people working in the subs.
We had a very clear connection between the subs and the head office. It helped us to reduce costs and be more efficient on how we launch products and how we address the market. The other things that we have done is that when you look at a sub, there is a lot of functions that doesn't really add value to sales, the back office. We move those people to a back office center that is in Szczecin, in Poland, in order to make sure that the people that are in the subs really add value. Those where we can work in an environment where the labor cost is cheaper, they should go there. It was not easy, for instance, the ContiCare model, we did it in nine months.
Between the time we start and the time we implement it was nine months. What I've learned during that period is that you can do more with less, and therefore, by doing that, you have a much, much more efficient organization, leaner, scalable, and efficient. What we have achieved during that period is that Region Europe, the cap cost to sales have decreased by 5 points. If you do remember, we are growing twice the speed of the market, and while we are doing that, we have been able to reduce the cost. It's, it's a very good combination to generate cash flow, and that cash flow, of course, is invested to fuel the growth. In summary, as I said to you, there is three take-home message that I would like you to remember. One, we do have commercial potential in Europe, pocket of growth.
Two, we're efficient and scalable. Europe will continue to grow, but it would be a profitable growth. These two elements is allowing us to really fuel the growth in the rest of the world.
Thank you, Alain.
As Andrew said, I'm Ed Viaume, Senior Vice President of Region North America. I'm actually new to the executive management team, not new to Coloplast. I started with the company just over four years ago, and I was leading the global effort around our consumer programs, so you can see a lot of the excitement that we have for this program globally, you will see fits very nicely into the U.S. About three years ago, I moved into the U.S. to lead the sales and marketing efforts of the U.S. organization, and now more recently, have picked up the entire North America region. Let me grab this. As a brief introduction to the North American market, I thought I'd point out some reasons why we find the North American market so interesting for Coloplast.
Well, first of all, it's basically two countries that I think you're very familiar with. The U.S., 50 states, which in many ways operate like a total country, and in many ways operate like 50 individual reimbursement methodologies that go on. Very complex type of payer systems that we have to work within. Canada, just to the north of us, again, I'm looking for the similarities here to say that the reimbursement or the payer system in Canada can, in many ways, operate like a national reimbursement system. They're also divided into 10 provinces, which can also fund reimbursement for the products in different ways. To that end, though, why do we see this, these markets as very interesting for Coloplast? Well, first, you have to look at the spend rate.
You know, when we look at healthcare spending as a % of GDP, it's very healthy in both of these markets. We see in the U.S., 18% spend, and in Canada, for the same, 11%. What does that mean? That means that our products are pretty ubiquitously reimbursed under most of the schema, reimbursement schema in both countries. We also see when we look at the demographics of the population, we see an aging population. We have the new baby boomers that are moving into the later part of their life, which in certain areas, like ostomy, really favors the conditions that people will end up using our products for. At the same time, too, this whole area of consumerism is exponentially growing in the U.S. in particular.
We see as these baby boomers age, they want to take more control of their healthcare. They want to understand what are product choices that they can have, and how will these product choices affect their ability to have a better lifestyle? We're meeting those needs as we move forward. We're about 550 employees, you can see our revenue is distributed. Roughly half of the revenue is coming from the Continence Care business, followed by ostomy with 30%, Wound Skin, about 20%. In general, the market is large, it can afford to pay for our products, the bigger opportunity for us is that we have low market share in both areas.
When I say we have low market share, that means the potential for us to not only gain new business that's coming from the hospital and patients that are being discharged, is equally, and if not, more greatly dwarfed, greater dwarfed by the size of the market for connecting with end users that are in the community. I can go into that in a little bit more detail if you look into each of our business areas. First, we look at the Continence Care market. This is a really exciting market for us at this point. You might think if we have market shares in the 40%-45% range, you're, you have market leadership here. Where is the ability to grow?
When you look at the U.S. market today, the market is pretty much dominated in the intermittent catheter segment by using uncoated catheters. You can imagine if you're an end user that is in a wheelchair and you have limited dexterity, to go into a public toilet and use a product that you have to open up and then put lubrication on it before you insert it to drain your bladder and deal with the mess of the lubrication, it can be very cumbersome. Enter Coloplast now, bringing the SpeediCath family into the marketplace. We have the ability to now have the prepackaged, ready-to-use hydrophilic catheters available to the marketplace, and our goal is to convert the market from uncoated catheters to hydrophilic catheters.
In the ostomy segment, as I was pointing out a little bit earlier here, we have about 112,000 new surgeries in the U.S. a year. You can see, based on sort of demographic and other, sort of trends that are happening in the marketplace, we see a growth of only 4% in the revenue side. That's impacted positively by things like the demographics, as I said, the aging population. We see increased use as consumerism takes hold in the U.S. We see more people wanting to use accessories, therefore, they're buying more products to deal with the lifestyle issues related to their condition. That's offset by a trend on the surgical side to see a slight increase in temporary procedures that are happening, which would reduce the number of, let's say, ostomy days.
At the same time, too, we see the general pressures on reimbursement happening, and that affects then the pricing of our products. When we flip over to the Wound and Skin side, you can see very small market share in this place. This is a very fragmented market. In Ostomy, for example, it's really three major competitors. In the Wound Skin space, there's over 40 competitors in this market space. What we do see is that there is trends within the U.S. market to look for manufacturers that can standardize care pathways for healthcare professionals and do that along the Skin and Wound continuum.
Coloplast is one of the few providers of products that can manage all the way from preventative efforts to manage the skin, all the way to treating the skin with a full range of products to do that. Tremendous opportunity to grow in all three areas. What's the history? Why haven't we gotten there up until now? What's been the struggle? Well, if you look at our history, we've been in the U.S. market for over 30 years, and we were growing at a nice rate, albeit with a lot of resources, because it requires a lot of resources to cover the U.S. market. Profitability was low. In 2006, we acquired Mentor, and that put us on the map as being the number one in urologicals area for the catheters, and we got very inwardly focused at that point.
We decided that it would be very important for us to take the U.S. organization and become profitable. A new strategy was launched around creating a profitable America. In that process, as we grew our profits, because we were defocusing our emphasis on expenses, we saw the growth decline. You can see that hit an all-time low in 2010, 2011, where we were mid-single digits in the growth. That's when myself and my predecessor came to the U.S., that was about three years ago. What we did to fix this situation was we put in place our Back to Basics strategy. Our Back to Basics strategy is what drives all the activities that we have in the U.S. and Canada now.
Really, the idea behind this is, what are the key levers that you can pull, and how can we pull all of them simultaneously in order to accelerate growth within the U.S., and do that profitably, by the way. Really, our goals here, our strategic themes, are pretty straightforward. We want to break through in Ostomy Care through our acute care win, so a focus on gaining the new patient discharges in the hospital and our consumer focus, focusing on... When we said there's 120,000 discharges, 112,000 discharges in the acute care setting, there's 600,000-700,000 ostomates that we can target in the community. Same thing on the Continence Care side.
In a similar fashion, we're defending and growing the Continence Care business because we want to defend our market share in the competitive space of uncoated catheters while we move the market to hydrophilic catheters. How are we going to do that? It's not just through the new discharges. There are many consumers that are in the community that don't know that these products actually exist. Now that we have them available, and available under reimbursement, there's a much opportunity to give a person a much better experience, managing their bladder control. In the area of Wound & Skin Care, we want to accelerate through gaining more acute care wins.
That's the primary market for the U.S., for both wound and skin, is in the acute care segment. We want to do that by leveraging or cross-selling both portfolios into the hospital systems and developing a value prop that meets the customer's needs. Fourth, are probably our most important area to make all of this happen, is we need to create a high-performing team. How are we going to create a high-performing team? We got to create a passion to win within the organization. We've been focused on that over the last couple of years, and I'll go into some detail on that. Finally, we need to invest to grow as we move forward.
There are some key opportunities where we can invest while we're growing and sort of fund that growth internally or organically in order to see better profitability. If I go into each of these themes in more detail, when I look at the Ostomy Care segment, we look at 3 major KPIs or three major levers that we can pull to drive the business. It's acute care wins, it's NPEs, which is new patient enrollments in the Coloplast Care program that you heard about earlier today, and the third area is looking at the community sales, where we do our community end-user programs to drive end users or consumers to our products in the community. You can see across all 3 areas, we're making very good progress.
Because you can't see the scale very well in each of these, I can tell you the area that we're most focused on at this point for the future is gaining more share within the acute care facilities. We know that that drives then the growth that goes into the community, and the more hospitals we can convert to Coloplast, the more end users we're going to get from the early time that they're being discharged. When we look at the Continence Care business and look at protecting the Self-Cath business while we're growing SpeediCath, again, we look at three parameters here. We look at our enrollments in the Coloplast Care Program, we look at our Self-Cath straight sales, and we look at our SpeediCath sales.
I can start by saying, you can see from the graph on SpeediCath that actually, even if I showed you the scale, it's pretty impressive what we're doing in that SpeediCath segment at this point. When we look at our Coloplast Care MPEs, we're also, because we're doing a lot of end user events and reaching out to consumers that are in the community, we're having good success in growing in that area. In the Self-Cath area, what we see is a decline in revenue, slightly. When we look at it from a units perspective, there really isn't that much of a decline, and the reason for that is we are the market share leader, we're the highest price in that segment, and there's a lot of competitors in that segment.
In order to remain competitive, we have to adjust pricing in order to be competitive over the long haul or convert them to SpeediCath. In the wound and skin segment, we measure very directly our Wound Care sales, our Skin Care sales, then we look at one key product within the Skin Care business, which is Interdry, which is one of our fastest growing products in the business, you can see the positive momentum we're seeing there. The Skin Care business largely dwarfs the Wound Care business at this point, we have lots of opportunity on both sides of it.
I can say that the area I'm focused most on at this point is making sure that we keep the momentum driving on Skin Care because our Coloplast brand is strong in Skin Care within the hospitals, and we want to leverage that into the Wound Care business going forward. The fourth area that I said is creating a passion to win. The way we look at creating a passion to win is really around creating what we call a virtuous circle. When we look at measuring our territory managers, in the U.S. and our management team that drive them, we look at how can we take the parameters that I just talked about and look by territory, where are we having success and where are we struggling? We're doing a much better job in managing performance at the local level on a regular basis.
Management drives development that we need to do. We're investing significantly in developing our territory manager professionals, not only in terms of better understanding of how to sell our products, but also just general selling skills, which will then lead to better rewards for the teams, driving better performance, et cetera. When I say performance, we've seen an uptick in their ability to make more in compensation, which keeps us competitive in the marketplace. We've also seen the opportunity to take people and ensure that we have long-term success and reduce the amount of turnover in the organization by creating levels for the territory managers to grow within, to create sort of a career pathway that allows people to stay longer with the company. Okay, the fifth area is to focus on investing to grow.
What I'm showing you on the left-hand side of the chart is really our 2010, 2011 costs. Then there's a certain of inflation to just the general cost that we carry within the P&L. Then look at the investment that we've taken over the last three years to where we've gotten to 2013, 2014. What's inside these costs? What are the major things that we're investing in in order to make the success happen? First is the field sales force. We've taken over the last couple of years, a significant amount of cost out of the business, which was primarily in the back office support. I think Alain alluded to doing this, the similar situation in Europe. We used that, plus some additional investment to fund more feet on the street, more dedicated resources.
We now have teams that sell specifically Ostomy Care products and wound and skin products. We've invested heavily in our consumer programs. What you heard Nicolas speak to, with a lot of the consumer investment that we've done, a lot of that has been done in the U.S. in order to reach out to many end users that are in the community to expose them to Coloplast products. We've focused on developing key account setup. When I say key accounts, it's making sure that we don't have the same person that's calling on a clinician and detailing a clinical story, is not the same person who's gonna talk to a dealer or distributor about a financial part of their business, and making sure that we have dedicated people who can speak the language of the customer that they're speaking to.
In summary, what's really driving the growth here for the U.S.? It's a combination of two major levers that we're pulling. The first one being the new products. We're launching all of the new lines that you heard about this morning, in the U.S. I think in the past, we were hesitant to do that because the reimbursement structure in the U.S. can be tricky, and we've found ways to do that now. SenSura Mio is on fire in the U.S. at this point. It's being very well received by our consumers and clinicians alike. The Brava accessories line is also a big growth area for us. We now have a good portion of the SpeediCath family.
I'd like to have all of the SpeediCath family in the U.S., but we're working towards that, and I'll look forward to seeing Compact Eve that you heard about earlier from Oliver, coming to the U.S. Peristeen. We're looking to develop and grow that market in the U.S. as there's no reimbursement for it at this point, but another growth opportunity in the continence care segment that can be very profitable for the business.... Really, it's taking these products and taking the new design DNA that Coloplast has put into them, that is very consumer-oriented, very consumer-friendly, takes what we say, takes the disease out of the product, so that when somebody looks at it, they can say, "If I'm wearing an ostomy appliance, I'm not wearing a medical product.
I'm wearing a beautiful piece of clothing that's a part of who I am", making that connection with the end users moving forward, and combining that with a significant investment in resources to reach out to the consumers. When we're reaching out to the consumers, it's either through our Coloplast Care program, where we're transitioning consumers as they leave the acute care facility, and they struggle with issues, we help them to get over those hurdles or blockages that gets them back to their new healthy normal through our Coloplast Care program. We also have what we call general direct-to-consumer type of programs, where we co-market through our dealer and distributor partners, opportunities for the end users who don't have access to our products to understand more about how they can help their lives.
We're focused on generally going out to the public through items like Google AdWords, where we attract people to our landing pages about our new products, as well as our recent update to Coloplast Care, which is an online service that Nicola had talked about earlier, that really helps to anticipate what are the challenges that people are gonna face, and how we can talk them through in an electronic format to give them education about those issues in order to get them back to a better place. Really, what has the success been? When you look at the results across the board, it's pretty straightforward that this is working.
We look at the, where is Coloplast growing relative to the rest of the market, and you can see in ostomy care, we're growing 15x the market, continence care, 13 x, and then roughly 1.5x the market in the wound and skin segment. From the strategic perspective, what are we doing in the region, North America, is we're moving from what was a profitable America focus now to getting back to basics, which is really focused on growth, to moving towards our full potential. When we say moving towards our full potential, we're saying investing in things like additional field sales force, additional consumer programs managers, in order to be able to reach out to more individuals to ultimately achieve market leadership. Thank you.
I've been looking forward to presenting you with the work that we're doing in emerging markets. I've been with the group for about six and a half years, and I look after this region together with a bunch of fine folks. Prior to that, I spent some time looking after our region, Europe, and prior to that, I looked after global marketing and commercial excellence for a few years. Before joining Coloplast, I had a sinister decade with McKinsey & Company, where I worked as a partner out of the Copenhagen office, with a focus on healthcare, consumer goods, and private equity.
I've been working hard over the past six years to basically learn how to speak plain English, but if you find some consultonese in some of the stuff that I'm saying, you know where it came from. All right? I'm gonna need the remote. I was hoping to do three things with you today. One was to give you an overview of what our market looks like, what is emerging markets in Coloplast, and how we set ourselves up to basically organize the work. The other thing I wanted to do was to tell you a bit about how we work with emerging markets. The title here is a dead giveaway. We believe strongly that growth comes through focus.
There's a strong granularity to growth that you need to respect, and I'll talk about how we work with that, and the tools that we employ to get that focus into the work that we do, because the portfolio is so large. The third thing I wanted to do is to tell you a bit about the results that we have created to date and what we expect going forward. No surprise, the world's a big place, when you've got the rest, you've got 200 countries. We're active in about half of those with sales. A bit more than 1,000 people.
What's a little bit particular about emerging markets is that the sales split that we have here is mainly ostomy, which reflects, I think, a basic assumption that we've run the region by for many years, which is that when you open a country, you start with ostomy. Our company got founded with ostomy, that's how we've started many markets historically. If you look at the markets, that is not necessarily a great assumption. It's not necessarily a great assumption. The ostomy market is growing 6%-8%. It's a DKK 2 billion market. You all know that it's correlated by correlated with particular types of demographics. The older a population and the more advanced cancer screening programs a country has, the more ostomies you're likely to find.
You have a lot of countries in this portfolio mix where the country demographics are quite young, and they look very different from what you find in the northern hemisphere. Very, very different. You don't start with ostomy in those countries, you have to start with something else, right? Which also is exciting because we get about a third of our current business in emerging markets is split evenly between Continence Care and wound care, so we have a lot of growth ahead of us. You look at the continence business, it's growing. The market, it's growing handsomely, 12% to 14%. This is a market that consists of collecting devices and not least, intermittent catheters.
Intermittent catheters and the demand for intermittent catheters, particularly our type of product, is correlated with the standard of care for bladder management for different types of patient segments. Most of you probably know that one of the most important patient segments that we serve is the spinal cord injured patient segment. Now, people break their back in car accidents. One particular type of analysis that is really interesting to deploy over the emerging markets reason, is to look at where do people drive like crazy and hurt themselves in geographies where they're at the same time, as access to financing for innovative products. It turns out there's a bunch of geographies where that's the case. I'll tell you a little bit about that later on, but Saudi Arabia has the highest incident rate of severe road traffic accidents in the world.
I didn't know that when we began that work at all. That was quite surprising. There's evidence online that you should check out once my talk is over, we get to the break. You should YouTube Saudi drifting, and you will find hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of examples of people having fun in their cars and hurting themselves. Now, there's nobody there to help them today, but that's one of the reasons that we're investing. We don't start with ostomy, because that's not where the potential is in Saudi Arabia. That's a young population. You start with continence and wound care. There's been an important change of I'm not gonna say strategy, 'cause this is just common sense, but we start with where we believe the potential is.
Continence Care, very exciting opportunity, not across all markets, but if people drive like crazy, we're interested. Then Wound Care. Nicolas will talk to the wound care market after the break. We're very excited about it in emerging markets. This is a market that holds growth potential for many years to come, correlated with diabetes and other macro developments as these economies develop. It's growing double-digit, and we expect a lot of growth to come from that. Another reason that we expect to grow a lot is that this Business is small still, right? It needs to become a lot bigger in the portfolio.
The ambition that we're putting forward to do that is basically say, we want to invest to build a region that can grow 25% year on year, which is a lot faster than we've done historically. It's a lot faster than we've done historically. The 25%, I'll get back to the how, but that requires a different way of working with the region than we've had in the past. Now, one of the reasons to be optimistic about our potential is that in the most important markets, we actually have pretty strong positions. If you look at China, if you look at Brazil, you look at Russia or Argentina here, we're the guys to beat.
Doesn't mean that we've exploited the market at all, because the growth potential for most of these markets lies in market expansion and penetration of more innovative products and treatment practices than these markets have had historically. The market shares here are blended, it's for the segments that we participate in. For China, this is Ostomy Care and Wound Care. For Brazil, it's all three areas. Russia, it's Chronic Care, for Argentina, it's all three business areas. We have strong positions where it makes sense to invest, right? We have organizations here who are covering the market already. We have a brand, we have customers. There's a foundation to invest in the large markets.
We've organized ourselves around five regions, and the only reason I put this up is that in the past two years ago, when we began to work with emerging markets, we were organized around three regions. The organizing logic back then was that we had one region looking after all distributor markets, one region looking after Latin America, and one region looking after all the other subsidiary markets. If you cover the world, that's tricky. That's really tricky. This way of organizing basically says, we want the VPs who head these businesses to be close to their markets, close to their teams, close to their customers, close to their partners. We want decision-making capacity where it matters, and it matters less in Copenhagen to drive this business than it does in these particular areas.
The VPs are now based in the anchor markets that they're responsible for and in the largest cities. That's worked out quite nicely for us. The only team that we have in Copenhagen is the export team that looks after our distributor markets. I talked about focus initially. The way that we think about driving focus into this portfolio, we do that in a couple of ways. One is that we formalize the obvious, right? That everybody is not created equal. Some countries are more important than others, and they get preferential treatment. We call them core, right? Core growth markets are China, Brazil, Russia, Argentina, Greece, and Poland. I'm assuming that the only one that's gonna raise some eyebrows on that list is Greece. What the hell is Greece doing on that list?
Greece is a distributor market. We look after the distributor markets in emerging markets, as a, as a legacy decision. We have a wonderful business there with a Greek distributor called the Mavrogenis, who runs a really impressive business model that's semi-integrated with the Greek healthcare system, where he actually provides care to patients at the point of discharge as well as in their home. This means that he has high market shares, and we have a great business with him. We like the Greek business, particularly after the country landed on its feet again. The, the next tier markets that we prioritize, we call new growth markets. These are markets that have large populations, they have real healthcare spend, but for different reasons, we have smaller businesses than we should have.
These are markets like South Korea, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey, India, and then when we say MENA here, the primary focus is Algeria and Saudi Arabia. These markets are very different, but they are the same in the sense that they hold potential for our products. There are patients there that need the products. There is a demand either out of pocket or through different sorts of financing. Then there's the rest, which is more than 180 markets, and the rest have to make do with what these 12, 13 markets get. Right, the same products, the same campaigns, the same commercial programs. We don't reinvent anything for the other markets.
Almost all of our investment capacity, the bulk of our leadership capacity, our attention goes to the focus market. That's one dimension of focus. The other dimension of focus is about creating clear roles for countries in the portfolio. We do that because we have many markets, we employ a simple financial portfolio logic. We've shown a simplified version of it here. It's a three-by-five matrix with the current performance on the horizontal axis as a function of growth and profitability. The further to the right you are, the worse it's going, the further to the left, the better you're doing. On the, sorry, on the vertical axis, we look at market attractiveness, low, medium, and small.
We set specific requirements for, what we think is the potential for low, medium, and high. Everybody who works in emerging markets as a country manager today knows this. This is, we call this the grid, and what's great about this is that it provides clarity. We believe strongly in restrictions, for the work to get clarity in what is the task at hand. If you are not performing very well currently, we don't want to invest in you. If you're a bleeder, there's got to be... It's almost with 100% certainty, there's no access to the additional funding. You have to prove that you can run the business. Really, what this is it's really common sense, right?
We just employ certain performance criteria to make you, or to get decisions made. Our country manager does not want to be a bleeder, and when we get everybody together and we look at the grid with all the countries in there, you don't want to be in the bleeder category, and you're going to work like crazy to get out of it. That's another way that we're doing to get focus into the portfolio. Another thing that we're doing. If you employ this logic to our portfolio of countries, you get six strategic themes. I'm going to spend a little bit of time on this chart because this talks a lot to the work that we're doing right now. The most important strategic theme for us is to expand China.
Maybe this goes without saying that China is important, but I'll just get a sip of water. China is unique in the EM portfolio for a few different reasons. One, it's big. I know that you know that, but it's big in a way that is it's a little difficult to comprehend, and it provides a lot of opportunities. With our latest investments into China, which is the biggest we've done to date, we will very soon be covering with home-based reps, top 100 cities. We like home-based reps. Home-based reps are more effective, they have better customer relationships, they spend less time traveling. It's a model that we know works, right? Top 100 cities.
Now, if you look at China and you want to see how many cities are there that have more than a million people. A million people is a nice, round number, where you have enough hospitals, you have enough patients, that it's going to start to matter. You can do real business there. There's 223 cities with surrounding areas with more than a million people in it. That number is just staggering. It's Copenhagen times 223. What this means from a potential point of view, is that you can take the model that we have today and basically deploy it in these 223 cities, even at average efficiency, and you're going to get growth. That, I think, is exciting. So that's one reason.
The second reason to be excited about China is we've run this business for a long time with a very old product portfolio, particularly in Ostomy Care, also to some extent in Wound Care. There's real willingness to pay in this market. This is the biggest luxury good market in the world. You look at lots of therapy areas, in pharmaceuticals, and you find that there's real willingness to pay for innovative products. We need to get some of the products that you've seen early on into China, and we have to get them to work. There is a big value upgrade agenda for China, which is the second reason to be excited.... The third reason to be excited about China is, historically, we haven't done much about, Continence in China.
On the catheter side, we just registered our first catheter in China. China has more than 100,000 ACI patients per year. That may not sound like a lot to you, but that's more than U.S. and Europe combined. This is a big opportunity. There's an installed patient base of 1.2 million people that we will begin to serve, and we will begin to connect with decent products, and decent treatment, and decent standard of care. This is not something that's gonna happen overnight. We understand that, right? We have seen what the Continence Care business can turn into from the U.S. and Europe, and we understand how it works, and we have products that are better than anyone else.
We feel confident that there's a longevity to the growth because we will be penetrating that market for many years to come. I think the fourth reason to be quite excited about China is that we have bigger degrees of freedom when it comes to pricing products. It is unique for us, and it gets a lot of attention. It also gets quite significant amounts of investments. It got into the portfolio just recently when the previous leader retired, we're fully immersed in making that first wave of investment come alive. We're quite excited about it. Expand China. Second one is expand Brazil. For those of you who've been following us for a few years, Brazil was painful two years ago. Let me phrase it like that.
We had a business that wasn't doing very well. The core performance curves were turning south. We instituted a number of changes, both to teams and the way that we work there. I'll get back to that in a little while. We've invested there, and it's working. Brazil is a very significant opportunity for us. We are probably well into the phase II of that investment by the close of this year. The third theme, turn around and then expand Russia. Russia, for us, like it has been for most other companies, when the financing trends south in the Russia system, very much a tender-based system, we get hit by that like everybody else.
We've used the opportunity recently to have a hard look at our organization, the way that we work, and the processes that we have, such that when the financing starts to come back, we will get at least our fair share of the potential in that market. We're quite excited about the positions that we have in Ostomy. We're just beginning to scratch the surface on Continence. There's a lot of work to be doing and a lot of growth to be had on the Continence side in Russia. MENA, I'll get back to MENA, it's Algeria and Saudi Arabia. We did an investment case on both of these markets a couple of years back, a year and a half back, and I'll talk a little bit about what we've learned from that in a chart or two from now.
Greece, sustain the current model, optimize it. Basically protect what we have there. There's a final theme of stuff that cuts across the region. Remember, this is 13% of our global portfolio, which basically means that we haven't done a lot of work with it, of stuff that cuts across. We've learned a lot over the past six years when it comes to professionalization of commercial processes. We're applying those learnings to emerging markets, both in the way that we work and the way that we set our teams. Six main strategic themes. Here's a snapshot of three of the larger investments. I've talked about China and Brazil. MENA, if I have to point to one area over the past two years where I think we've seen a fair share of pain, it's this place.
The two investments that we got approved for Algeria and Saudi Arabia, were almost a year delayed, probably something that looks like a year delayed for both internal reasons as well as external reasons. You have to remember that over the past six years, we haven't been doing a lot of market entry in Coloplast. The agenda has really been about other things. The discipline about actually opening up a market, getting a perspective on that market, getting your market entry right, and getting, I would say, the hundreds and hundreds of details that need to happen in actually making a market entry come alive, we've lost a little bit of sense of that discipline. We made some mistakes that we have worked hard to correct.
I'll also say that we've been surprised in the meeting with Saudi and Algerian bureaucracy. I can speak at length about that over drinks tonight, these countries operate very differently, and it's the paper handling processes are cumbersome, to say the least. The good news is we're in. We're in both markets. Both markets are extremely interesting for a couple of reasons. One is they are large, right? Algeria has 38 million people, and it has a healthcare system that's modeled on the French system. They have healthcare practitioners made at the McGonigle School in France. They know what they're doing, right? They have a way of financing products.
If you've got 38 million people, you've got a healthcare system that works, you can finance products, somebody needs to connect the patients with the products to make the business happen. That's what we're doing. Saudi Arabia, something like that, too, and big tenders, lots of opportunity in both markets. We're quite excited about it. Not that they're not tricky, they are tricky, but we're quite excited about both these markets. The one thing that I am the most proud of the work that we've done over the last two years, is on this chart. It doesn't say much with these four boxes, but we believe deeply that for something to work, you have to get your processes right.
If you wanna invest in a market, you have to be careful in how you design the core processes. The two top ones, segmentation and targeting, and patient acquisition. You cannot be successful in our business if you don't do that well. It's impossible. Segmentation and targeting is about figuring out where the potential is in a market, and sizing your sales force and allocating your capacity to get to that potential. You can't go out and buy the data, right? It's not like you can go to China and say, "Give me a report on a specific type of ostomies, and then show me where they are in the market." You have to do a lot of analytical work.
You have to get quality into that work, that matters when you have to allocate your capacity across 20,000 hospitals. Where do you go? It matters a lot that you get quality to that answer. The same thing for patient acquisition. That's the core of the chronic model. You have to be present at this, at the source of discharge, to be able to pick up the patient and guide them through the care continuum, you hang on to them. Absolutely critical. Most of our countries or many of our countries, are tender, are tender markets, tender management, the key account management processes related to winning tenders, bidding, pulling through, optimizing tenders are core process. What's different now, compared to two years ago, is that we have the data on this now.
We're now capable of picking up the phone and talking to the Brazilian team of what their patient acquisition rate looks like, not just for the country, not just for regions, but by rep, right? By hospital. What that does for us, is that it gives us a data-driven perspective of how the engine room of the business is doing. It surfaces issues faster, and it just makes us more capable of managing the business for performance. I spent a lot of time doing that. We learned a lot. I think I'm running out of time. I'm not gonna go through that. We're very pleased with the development in Brazil. It looked awful two years ago.
It feels like a completely different world now, and it's growing gangbusters, because of the team down there doing great work, both on the tender and patient acquisition side. We think we're off to a good start. We're very excited about the opportunity in emerging markets. We're just getting started. Thank you.
I've had the pleasure of running the Wound Care business since 2010. I think as a small example of efficiency, and we all know efficiency is an important mantra in Coloplast. You've seen it took five hours and five presenters to take you through the chronic care business, well, Stefan, who will follow me here shortly, we will take the full business in just 20 minutes each. Let's talk about efficiency. Now, Wound Care. Lena also showed you sort of the different road shows we've had. I think I had my first roadshow around Wound Care at the Hungary roadshow.
Many of you came to me and you were smiling, and you kind of also looked me in the eyes and said, "Well, what have you deserved to take on this responsibility?" I'm actually happy that I today, sort of four years later, can come back and reveal some of the results we have created on behalf of the Wound Care business. The way I would like to structure the next approximately 20 minutes is about recapping a little bit about, you know, where are we actually coming from in terms of our Wound Care business? Where are we right now? Of course, also, where would we like to go with the business? Before we do that, let's recap some of the facts around the business.
I think you all know it's approximately 14% of our total group revenue. It's around DKK 1.6 billion, if we take the full Wound & Skin Care business. We have what we call fully dedicated frontline operations in 15 of our key markets. In the rest of the world, we are serving the Wound Care customers, either through shared setups or through distributors. We do also have a fully dedicated setup in terms of R&D, as well as global marketing for the Wound Care business. What kind of a value pool can we sort of relate to when we talk about our business? That's what we call the advanced wound care market. That's a value pool we estimate to be worth around DKK 15 billion, growing around 4% in value.
Obviously, there are quite different, let's say, dynamics, depending on what part of the world we are talking about. Let's talk about Europe. The European market, we believe, is a market that, yes, has a nice value pool, but we do not believe it will grow, going forward. Although there is a nice, let's say, volume of patient in the market, we do see that the value will be impacted by continued pressure on prices. Both driven by government activities and initiatives, but definitely also driven by, let's say, the fierce competition we are seeing in the wound care space. We do not have the privilege of operating just with three to four competitors in the wound care space. We have almost 10 to 12 competitors in many of our markets.
If you look at the other developed markets, Ed talked a little bit about it. This is in particular the U.S. The U.S. still enjoys some nice growth rates, driven of course, by the large volume of patient, but also that we see the market is still giving us some fairly good prices. The real growth driver in wound care is the emerging market. What we see in the emerging markets is, as a consequence of the new healthcare structures, is that we see the market shifting from traditional wound management to advanced wound care management. That's one driver. The other driver is, of course, more patients being treated. Of course, when you have diabetes, you're also gonna see a need for wound management. Of course, that is also fueling the growth of the so-called emerging markets.
There are two emerging markets that in particular stands out of interest when you talk about a potential value pool, both short-term and long-term, and that is China and Brazil. That is by far the two biggest mid to long-term opportunities that exist when you talk wound care outside of the mature markets. Let's talk about where we're coming from when it comes to wound care. We've been in this business for 30 years. I think it's fair to say that we have some legacy when you've been in that business for 30 years. A legacy that has been driven by innovations that we have brought to the market over the years. There have also been some development in the revenue over that period of time. I think it's fair to say that...
As many of you know, and also have commented upon, it was not actually until 2010 that I think we took a firm grasp on this business. You can say, "Well, you've been there for 30 years, almost, so why should be 2010?" Well, in 2010, we could clearly see, 1, that we were simply not getting enough return on this asset. Why? Well, we had a top line that was declining, and if we actually did some analysis, we could also see that we're not even doing on par with the market. We had also been very inconsistent in the way we were approaching our customers. I think in many markets, we were confusing our customers, whether we were there or not were there.
Last but not least, in 2010, I think also we clearly could see that we needed to do something about innovation. I think you have clearly seen today that innovation is something that we believe is essential if you want to drive your business. What did we do? Well, we set out a new direction, and as you also know, one of our key mantras here in Coloplast is that we want to do profitable growth. As we did not see, let's say, overall, satisfactory level of profitability, the first thing we did was to improve profitability, because once you have profitability, then you can also allow yourself to start to invest in growth initiatives. We started with profitability and then moved into how we can drive the top line.
Many of you know that we have been working on this turnaround. I think it's also fair to say that we have done a lot of stuff, but there are six things that I really would like sort of to highlight that I think stands out and are some of the key drivers behind our turnaround. Well, first of all, we do believe that if you want to focus on the business, you need to have a dedicated setup. Dedicated setup is not dedicated setup in Denmark, that's dedicated setup towards your customers. Of course, the first thing we did was to make sure that we had dedicated frontline people just focused on calling on the Wound Care customers. We created that in all of our key markets, and as I mentioned before, we have that in our key 15 markets today.
If you create a dedicated frontline, you need also to make sure that you have a machine room that can feed that dedicated frontline. We decided also to create a dedicated setup in terms of marketing and innovation, so they could feed the dedicated frontline. The third thing we looked into in terms of optimizing our business was, of course, asking ourselves, "Do we have enough presence in front of our customers? Do we have a competitive sort of position?" Actually, in many markets, we could see that we were not competitive in terms of share of voice. In other markets, like in China, we could see that there were opportunities, but we were not investing. One of the things we also did was to increase our share of voice. Very simple, but pretty essential if you wanna improve your business.
The fourth thing we did was another very simple question, which was: Are we seeing the right customers? As a company that has a strong heritage in the hospital segment, I think it's fair to say that also in Wound Care, we were probably a little bit too stocked in the hospital segment, while the business was moving more out in the community. We also changed our focus to become much more oriented towards the community channel. Once you have your right commercial infrastructure, then of course, the next question is: Do you then have a competitive offering that your frontline can go out with? Here, we also did a couple of fixes. First of all, did we have a dialogue with our customers that was simple and easy to understand for our customers? No.
Therefore, we changed the entire marketing platform to a simpler and much more streamlined platform, centered around what we believe is essential, i.e., superior absorption, and that's also what we believe is one of our points of differentiation when we talk about our portfolio. We did also have a big gap in terms of portfolio, because we were not playing in the fastest growing segment, which is the so-called silicone segment. That's the segment where competitor products like Mepilex and Allevyn Gentle belongs to. In 2010, we entered that for the first time. These are sort of six things that stands out in my book, as important parameters for what we've been doing with our business. As you all know, we're here to deliver results, so of course, the fundamental question is: did it work? We believe so.
We believe that we now have six consecutive quarters where we have improved the momentum of the business quarter-over-quarter. We do believe that this has showed that we do know what it takes to run this business. And we do believe that we are, together with the improved profitability and now with a better top line, actually also delivering more value of this asset than we have done in the past. Yeah. I can see it's 20 to four. Let's talk a little bit about where we're going. Now, we talked about where we're coming from, and we talked about sort of where we are. Now, let's talk about where we're going. Obviously, that's the way I sort of think about business, let's make it pretty simple.
I mean, of course, we need to drive more value out of this business going forward, and we do believe we can get more value out of it. I think you have seen that, we do believe that there are opportunities in the mature markets, but we do also know that we need to find a way on how we tackle these challenges that we see, for instance, in Europe. We do also see that there are some significant opportunity for us to leverage in the emerging markets. Last but not least, if we wanna stay relevant, not just in the mature markets, but also in the emerging market, we need to bring more innovation to our customers. With that in mind, we have actually created a new strategic direction for our business that we have called Expanding the Power of Wound Care. Why expanding?
Well, because we believe that there is actually a great opportunity for us to get more value out of the Wound Care business versus what we have been doing so far. This we have translated into four very simple strategic themes. Theme number one, we have called to build sustainable leadership positions in key emerging markets. What does that mean? It means we are going in a few markets, not a large portfolio of markets, but in a few markets, to become a leading Wound Care player. Not a number three, not a number five, a leading Wound Care player. In this context, there are two markets in particular that stands out, because the short term and long term represents two of the biggest deltas one can pursue if you want to play in the emerging market, Wound Care space, and that's China, and that's Brazil.
We will also be forced to go for pockets of growth in the mature markets. Yes, maybe the mature markets as a total are not growing, but there will be pockets of growth that are worth going for. Let me give you a couple of examples. The whole silicone segment is still a growing segment in many of the mature markets. We want to tap into that growth opportunity. We do see that there's probably more value sitting in the community channel versus the hospital channel. Let's tap into that. We may also be forced to say that certain geographies we will not be serving because there is less commercial attractiveness in terms of serving them versus other markets, and there we have to find very cost-effective go-to-market models. In order to deliver on the first two bullet points, we need to bring more innovations to our customers.
Last but not least, we do believe that it's important also to have the right talent on board in order to deliver on our strategic objectives. Let me dive into the first three ones here and give you a little bit more flavor of what is in it and how we're actually doing on those three. Let's talk about building sustainable leadership positions in key emerging markets, and as I mentioned, and which also was spoken about before, just like in chronic care, China and Brazil stands out as two very important geographies where we want to build a sustainable leadership position in. If we take China, we have invested in for the last three years.
We actually believe that we are today the leading wound care player in China, both in terms of market share and in terms of sales force coverage, i.e., number of reps on the ground. We have a pretty consistent growth rate, I've seen that for the last two years. What we're doing right now is that we are expanding our presence even further in China, reflecting on the sales force coverage strategy that Kristian talked about covering the biggest cities in China. We are also going to add more commercial programs and more products to our portfolio in China. In Brazil, we also believe we are in a very strong position. We have turned the wound care business completely around in Brazil as well, through the dedicated setup we have.
Today, we have a fully dedicated setup in Brazil, where we are covering both what we call the public channel, but also the private channel. In Brazil, both channels are very sizable pockets of growth and value pools. We are actually covering both the private and the public. In addition, I'm gonna come back to the whole NPT story here in a few slides. We launched our NPT solution in December of last year into the Brazilian market. That means that we today are one of the very few wound care players in Brazil that are covering both the public and the private channels, with a full portfolio covering both dressings and NPT solutions. Emerging markets is important. Definitely, we also need to make sure that we tap into the opportunities in mature markets.
There are three markets that in particular are of importance to us: that's France, that's Germany, and the U.S. If we take France, my dear colleague, Alain, is absolutely right, that prices are always under pressure in France, and in wound care, I can tell you that is in particular the case. Some of you know that last year, the French government decided to take reimbursement out of our silver products or antimicrobials because they wanted to save costs. That, of course, had an impact on our performance picture in France. However, what we are seeing is that in France, with our fully dedicated sales force, that we are actually taking our business to stabilization, despite having lost our entire silver range.
The reason for that is, that our newest and latest version of Biatain Silicone have received very strong customer feedback in France, and is what is driving the uptake we are seeing in our French business right now. Germany is also a very important wound care market. What we're seeing in Germany is the same thing. As soon as we launched our new and latest version of Biatain Silicone, we have seen a very nice pickup in our overall performance picture. If we talk about the U.S., Ed was alluding to it, we have, first of all, through the dedicated setup, now seen nice synergies between what we're doing in skin as well as in wound, and we have had a couple of nice contract wins that really are fueling the growth that we are seeing right now in the U.S.
Let's talk about innovation. Yes, we do believe that we are onto something pretty exciting here when we talk about our latest version of Biatain Silicone. I think some of you even had the pleasure to see the manufacturing of it yesterday, if I'm right, in Mirtusz. What excite us is actually the feedback we're getting from our customers. What I'm gonna share with you now is data that we showed at the EAU Congress that took place in Madrid a little bit more than a month ago. The data is covering almost 1,000 healthcare professionals across seven markets. What we asked them to do was basically from a clinical point of view, to evaluate our Biatain Silicone product.
What we believe is very compelling is that 74% of this pool of healthcare professionals are actually telling us that they believe when they evaluate our product versus our competitor products, that when it comes to the single most important parameter from a clinical effectiveness perspective, they see us as being better. Two. If we ask them overall, how do you evaluate this product versus any of the other products that are out there? Eight out of 10 are telling us they believe this is better. Last but not least, which I think is very important and very exciting as well, nine out of 10 are telling us that they intend to prescribe more of this product going forward.
We do believe that with Biatain Silicone, we have a great opportunity to add more innovations to our customers and therefore drive our top line even further. A second piece that we are adding in to bring more innovations to our customers is the NPT solution. We announced that in the autumn of last year, and as you well know, this is a device that we have gotten access to through a partnership, a strategic partnership with a U.S.-based company called Devon. We believe that playing in NPT is a must if you want to be a relevant wound care player, not only in the mature markets, but in particular in the emerging markets. We were attracted by this opportunity because we believe that the device here fits very well with our marketing strategy, where we want things to be simpler and more intuitive. This is a very simple...
This is a very intuitive NPT solution versus the other products that exist out there. On top of that, we believe that due to the simpleness of this product, we can commercialize it without having to invest in large additional infrastructure. I think many of our colleagues, let's call them that, who are playing in the NPT space, have invested quite a large amount of money in building dedicated NPT infrastructure. We don't see a need for that, given the features of this product. On top of that, we believe that we can go to market in a very different way than many of the other NPT players are. Today, the model is a rental model. We believe that we can go through a non-rental model with this setup, because it's simpler and it's easier to handle also for the buyers as well as the healthcare professionals.
Now, we're pretty humble towards this opportunity because NPT is not an easy space to play in. There are many competitors. Therefore, we have piloted this concept in a mature market to get some experience for what does it take to commercialize it and win with it in a mature market and as well in a emerging market. That's why we have piloted in both Switzerland and in Brazil. What we're very happy about is that the customers, both in the mature market as well as in the emerging market, are confirming our hypothesis around the clinical relevance of the product, as well as the commercial potential of the product. This knowledge we're using right now to define how we wanna roll it out on a more global level. We will roll it out more globally come the next financial calendar year for us in Coloplast.
We will roll it out in waves, not in one go, the waves will be defined around regulatory situation as well as commercial potential. Of course, we will be happy to get back at a later point in time with more specific insights to market performance and market uptake on this product. This is another piece of innovation that we believe will give us some traction going forward. We do need, of course, also to build a pipeline for the future.
Just like the rest of the Coloplast organization, we have done that through a very comprehensive research, actually an anthropological approach, where we have been working with both end users and healthcare professionals across the world to really understand what are some of the unmet needs within the wound care space, seen both from a consumer's point of view, but definitely also from a healthcare professional's point of view. I cannot reveal all the details. We'll be happy to do that sort of at a later point in time, but just to give you a flavor of where we're going, you could say we have three themes that we are building our future pipeline around. Theme number one is that we really want to have products that are focused on skin and what we call infection, as well as intuitive use.
The second bucket will be centered around, as you also have seen from our chronic care products, around the design. We want to have what we call a habit-breaking look and feel. Interestingly enough, just like we have talked about in chronic care, we do also see that there is a big demand for a so-called accessory line when you talk about Wound & Skin Care across the world, because for many, that includes the consumer, wound management is not just a question about treating the wound, it is as much as treating the surrounding skin. Hence, we want to bring out also a portfolio that really can address those needs, centered around making sure that we have easy-to-use skin accessories, dealing with both what we call protection and prevention of infections.
In summary, we do believe that we are getting more value out of our business compared to the past. We do believe we have turned an important corner for our business. We do believe we have a pretty clear view on what we need to do in order to grow the business even further. We feel we are progressing well on this new strategic agenda. That's why we also sort of feel comfortable about that we will be able to deliver on our, let's say, long-term ambition, which is to at least reach, on a consistent level, high single-digit growth rate for the wound care business. Which means that we will be growing more than the market, which means we will be taking share across the world. With that, thank you very much for the attention.
Good afternoon. I'll give you three things with the presentation over the next 20 minutes. I'll give you a picture of where we stand with the Urology Care business today. I'll give you an introduction of how we see the market also going forward. I'll give you a perspective of how we see the performance in this business area over the next years. All in all, it's a fairly simple story, actually. It is all about doing more with what we have, because we basically have what we need. What also makes it simple is that it builds on the presentation I gave to many of you in London in 2012. Also in that context, it's a fairly simple story.
The picture I have here, I always include that when I do presentations, because it is important to understand that this is where we fail or succeed. We live in the operating room, so to say, and that's where we perform. We call all of this maximize synergies to grow Urology Care globally, and as I mentioned, this is similar to what we discussed in 2012. Patient needs and physician needs across the globe are very similar in the Urology Care space, and that is what allows us to get maximum benefit from our very both broad and deep portfolio. We have a portfolio of products in the Urology Care area that spans from implantable devices in the one end, all the way through to single-use devices at the other end.
Here's a little service message that previously we've distinguished between surgical urology or SU products and disposable surgical urology, DSU products.
That is now gone. The reference points will, going forward, be implantable devices and single-use devices. Much as similar to Nicolas' presentation, we operate the Urology Care business as a dedicated organization. We have sales organizations, as mentioned here, in 19 countries operating separately or dedicated. We have dedicated set up for global marketing, R&D, and a number of the support functions. The market we operate in has a yearly value of approximately DKK 10 billion, and we estimate it to be growing somewhere around 3% and 5%. These numbers should be taken with a fairly large grain of salt. It's a very fragmented market from a data standpoint, so it is difficult to find really robust sources. So take this number as an indication of the area, both geographically and product-wise, that we are active in.
This is how we define our market. There are a basic growth driver that is similar to what we discussed for chronic care. We've got demographics, and we've got lifestyle changes that is driving growth across our four product areas. The four product areas are endourology, which is primarily single-use devices, mostly related to stone management. Here, the underlying growth, except from demographics and lifestyle changes, are continued efficiency in procedure, and that goes for time for procedure, number of devices used, and eventually being able to take procedures out of operating room and into a clinical setting or clinic setting, for instance. We have Men's Health, which is implantable products for male incontinence and penile implants.
Even if these products have now been in the market for quite a few years, actually decades, we're still dealing with a largely under-penetrated market, both in the U.S. and also in Europe. There is significant growth potential there as well. General Urology is a very broad portfolio of products and procedures, BPH, lots of different things in there, a very broad portfolio of products. This is probably the area where we see the highest sensitivity to cost, and that is influencing that market and will also do so going forward. We have the Female Pelvic Health market, which is implants for pelvic organ prolapse and stress urinary incontinence, and that has for sure been an interesting space for the past couple of years. We believe that the market has bottomed out.
We believe that we are now back to growth in the low single digit to keep that frame of reference. We believe that the market is growing again. There is a fundamental need, and there is also a fundamental need for the products. There are areas where the synthetic mesh is required. Because we assume that quite a few of you have questions to litigation status and where we stand in that whole situation, here's a very busy slide. Consider it an attempt on our side to be helpful, providing you an overview of how we see this situation. There are 3 tracks in classical mass tort in the U.S. We have the one at the bottom, which is what we assume to be the triggering event.
FDA's updated health notification back in July 2011, that focused, which is important to notice, focused at synthetic mesh transvaginally placed for pelvic organ prolapse. It was a very, very specific area that was included in the updated health notification. The other area in the updated health notification was a focus on single-incision slings, where they said, "Hey, we need to probably understand this a little bit better." That is what we assumed led to the first lawsuits that came against us in July of 2011, and then quite quickly after that, the number of suit piled up, to say the least, both against us and also against our competitors, or in this sense, in this sense, colleagues in the, in the industry.
We saw the formation of multidistrict litigation, one against Coloplast and one against many of our competitors. It is important to distinguish multidistrict litigation, where handling trials from an administrative standpoint is consolidated. This is not a class action, situation, so very, very different. It is still individual lawsuits, even if we are talking about lawsuits in the thousands. That's the phase we call structuring and maturing. The plaintiffs' attorneys build up inventories, they form the multidistrict litigation, and then, the party starts. We've seen bellwether trials in a number of the multidistrict litigations, and I assume that many of you have been following those as well. They've fallen as pearls on a string, since 2012 and up into 2014.
There have been some that fell out in favor of plaintiff. There have been some that fell out in the favor of defense. The information we had when we got to the very last day in April, both on our on our own side and also taking the provision made by Endo Health or AMS of DKK 4.7 billion, roughly, for approximately 20,000 suits, led us to saying, "Now we believe we have enough information to have an opinion of where this will end for us." That led us to a provision of the DKK 1 billion that you all know about, for what we assume will be in total, approximately 7,000 lawsuits. This is where we stand.
That's again, the information we have at hand. This is what we believe at current. The latest thing that has happened, which was also expected, FDA came out with a proposed reclassification of pelvic organ prolapse from a Class two to a Class three device. That was anticipated. No real surprises there either. This is where we stand. This is an overview to the best we can give it to you at current. It's important to notice that we have not withdrawn products from the market. We believe the products we sell are safe and efficient when used as instructed by a well-trained physician. We maintain that position, and we maintain the products in the market accordingly.
Interestingly enough, in the light of everything that has happened, our position in the Female Pelvic Health space has actually elevated quite significantly over the past two years. For us, the situation has not been all bad from a competitive standpoint. Oops! Here we go. The competitive space we're in, we meet the same handful of competitors at a global level. There are and have been some changes primarily in the go-to-market between Female Pelvic Health and endourology over the past two years, where we've seen some of our competitors making adjustments in how they approach and how they handle the market. In the female pelvic health space, we have seen some concentration occurring based on competitors either completely pulling out or pulling individual products out of the market.
We believe we're well-positioned in the market. We have a very broad portfolio, as I mentioned, again, all the way through from implantable devices to single-use devices at the other end. We have a portfolio that goes fully up against that of many of our competitors in the area. If we look at where we stand today in Urology Care, we enjoy a market share that we estimate to be somewhere between 10% and 15% at a global basis, and we're well positioned, as I mentioned, to grow that further over the next couple of years. Quick look at the individual product areas. Endourology, we have a very broad, well-established portfolio. We have a couple of innovative products that are very strong door openers for us. We have a lot of potential, especially in the U.S.
Men's Health, continued innovative products. We know how to deal with the market, well-established competition, not much surprise there. Female Pelvic Health, as mentioned, we have a strong position. A lot of that coming out of the acquisition we did back in 2010, where we acquired Mpathy, where we got access to the lightest weight mesh on the market, patent-protected position, actually, that has been extremely well perceived or received over the past couple of years, especially in the light of everything that's been going on. That's also a position that we have been growing and will continue to grow over the next couple of years. General Urology, same situation, a portfolio that has been developed basically over 120 years, we have what it takes.
From a portfolio standpoint, we have what we need, and that is again, similar to what I told you in 2012. We also have a strong potential again, from a geographical standpoint, this is a little bit of a busy slide, but I'll walk you through it. When you look at the Coloplast column, that shows the distribution of our revenue. The blue at the bottom is the share of revenue we have in Europe. The dark gray in the middle is the share of revenue we have in North America, and at the top you have rest of world. If you compare that over to how that value is distributed from the market, you can see that we have a very strong way towards North towards North America.
Another way of saying that is we have a huge growth opportunity outside, U.S. The same holds true for female pelvic health and the opposite for our single-use devices. Crossing over and continuing that crossover, again, maximizing the synergies, holds a lot of growth potential for us. Again, it's relatively inexpensive in the sense that it's a lot of it is question of getting market registration and getting the products in the hands of a very capable, strong sales and marketing organization in the U.S. and in Europe. That has worked for us, it's worked very well over the past years. If you look at the journey we've been on, 2010, 2012, we defined that as a turnaround period. We completed that in 2012, largely by acting differently.
We've benefited, obviously, from a lot of the efficiency gains we've heard about from chronic care and the rest of the business, but we completed that turnaround in 2012, and the phase we're in right now, we refer to as a globalization. We're maximizing the present, while at the same time, and that's an important notice, we're investing for the future. We are building a strong platform of products and initiatives that will continue to drive our growth going forward. If I look out in the future and how far is the future? That's a good question. I think we are getting closer than we've been before. If I look out in the future, I see a business that is both globalized and that has a significant leveraging effect when we look at it from a financial performance standpoint.
The priorities we have to achieve it, fairly simple. We've got four that we really focus on. These are our agenda points, shared with the whole organization, and they should know them if they're waking up 2 :00 AM at night. The first one is all about commercial or geographical expansion. Another one is advancing our endourology position. Interesting growth opportunity. We have a strong portfolio, much more to go for. Female Pelvic Health, as I mentioned, we have a patent-protected position with the lightest weight mesh. We are committed to the 522 studies that have been required from the FDA. Let's see how that shakes out in terms of competition when we look out, when they really have to put the money on the table, and then let's see how that competitive space look at that point.
LSIS is still in rollout phase and doing very well, very well received by physicians, super strong results, so that's a good, that's a good growth driver going forward. As I mentioned, we continue to invest in innovation across all of the, across all of the product areas. The little picture in the left, top left corner is my top 25 management team in the cadaver lab in Minneapolis at our management meeting, week before last. We went in there because everybody in the organization needs to understand this is where we perform. We have everybody in there from finance all the way through to marketing and sales. That was a great experience.
If I look at where we stand, the ambition of doubling the business remains, and doubling is where we say we hit a revenue around DKK 2 billion. Why that number? Well, basically because we can see that it's doable, it's achievable with what we have from a geographical standpoint and the product portfolio. We can also see that we can do that and at the same time grow our profitability quite significantly from a level that we call healthy to strong. What are the specific numbers? I can't share that, but that is the perspective we have on the business. That concludes my presentation.
You have heard a lot of presentations today. You have heard Lars talk about our growth strategy. You have heard about new products, you have heard about how we intend to get closer to our consumers, and you have heard about geographical expansion. What I would like to do is to talk about value creation in the context of what you've heard today, okay? Good. We started this morning by Lars announcing our new and more ambitious long-term guidance of growing between 7% and 10% on the top line and adding half to 1 percentage point on the EBIT line. That guidance rests on the fact that we know we have some very stable and attractive market fundamentals. You've heard some of them today. We know that demography is going our way.
We heard from Kristian about how emerging markets are expanding their markets. We know we have a great degree of loyalty to our products, and we also know there are actually quite high barriers of entry to our markets. Today, you have heard about the commercial potential, our organic growth potential that we see in our business. When we combine that with the scalable business model that we have built up over the past five years, and that we intend to continue and hold on to, that's actually what helps us create value. Now, let's go a little bit deeper into how the things you've heard today are actually going to create value. First of all, when we talk about value creation in Coloplast, what we mean is shareholder value, total shareholder return. That's value creation to us.
In order for us to work with that on a daily basis, in a structured way, we need to translate it, and we translate it into economic profit. We do so because when we look over the past many, many years, there's a very, very strong correlation between total shareholder return and economic profit. That's how we measure it. That's why today I want to go through the elements of economic profit and how it relates to what you have heard today. I want to talk to you about the revenue growth, the profitability, our asset efficiency, and our gearing. Let's start with revenue growth, in particular, what I want to start with is the price and volume mix and how we think about that.
If we look at the market, the way we see the market is that we see the volume growth is mid-single digit. We see about 1% price pressure in the market, and then we see relatively unchanged mix. The reason we think it's unchanged is that, yes, we do see higher quality, more expensive product coming in at one end of the spectrum, but we also see some lower quality, more generic, lower cost products coming in at the other end. All in all, we see that as fairly stable or unchanged, and that gives the net effect of our market value growth, which is the 4%-5% that we, you know, talk about to you quite often. If we then look at what are we doing?
You have heard today our plans for how we intend to gain market share. We will continue to work in each individual country we are in optimizing our pricing, our price structure, our rebate structure, so that we continue to work on pricing. We will upsell. Examples of that, Ed told you earlier today about how we sell our SpeediCath Compact instead of the Self-Cath in the U.S. That's one example. In some of our emerging markets, or some markets, not necessarily emerging markets, we take users that use Assura products and put them onto SenSura products. We continue to see if we can increase the value per, for each user. If we add the two thing, the market and our efforts, then we get the net effect, which is that we see high single-digit growth in terms of volume.
We see less than the 1% price pressure, because we work with prices, we see an ongoing value upgrade. When we add all that together, then that's where we get to the 7%-10%. That was just to give you an overview of that. Now, with the 7%-10% growth, how will that impact the composition of our business? If we look at our business areas, we don't think it's going to have a big effect. We think the split between our business areas is most likely going to be more or less the same in three-five years as it is today. However, we do expect that there will be an impact on the geographical composition of our business. Today, we have 67% of our business being revenue in Europe.
We expect that to go down to 60%, because we expect the areas outside Europe to grow more. Those of you who attended our Capital Markets Day in London in 2012, might recall that I said exactly the same thing then, and we are still at 67%. What has happened? Europe has actually performed a lot better than what we expected at the time, and that has meant that the mix, geographical mix, is unchanged. As we know that any growth in Europe is very profitable growth, that's also the reason why we've actually delivered more than the EBIT margin improvement of 0.5%-1% that we promised in 2012.
That's also why Lars could say this morning, that the DKK 1 billion we were going to invest in sales-enhancing initiatives, we've been able to do that faster, because we've had more growth in Europe. All in all, this is what actually leads us to the long-term guidance of 7%-10% growth. It is based on investing in products, you've seen that today, investing in our consumer journey, getting closer to our consumers, and our geographical expansion. Talking about our top-line guidance leads me to talk about the next part of economic profit, i.e., the profitability. Let's start with the guidance here, where we have said that we can expect to increase our profitability by half to one percentage point per year over the next three-five years. It's driven by revenue growth, scalability, and cost discipline.
We have already talked a lot about the revenue growth, so let's now talk about the profitability part. What I've got here is, and it will be filled out, but it's a matrix showing the lines that you can also see in our accounts. The cost of goods sold, distribution, i.e., our sales and marketing, admin, and R&D. I want to talk to you a little bit about how we see scalability within those functions or lines. If we start with the cost of goods sold, first of all, you can see for each of them how we have moved from 2008, 2009 to now, and this is % of revenue. Our cost of goods sold, we believe, actually has got quite high scalability. We've got overhead, a headquarters overhead for our production unit, here in Denmark, and also at the sites.
There is actually quite a large part of fixed, semi-fixed costs, which do not need to increase as revenue increases. Fairly high scalability there. Also, obviously, some needs for investment. We need to invest in new machines when we bring on new products, and occasionally, every two to three years, we also need to invest in new factory or add-ons to our factories. If we look at the distribution line, there is. As I said, there are medium scalability, and that covers actually quite high scalability in Europe, as we've also talked about earlier, and then lower scalability outside Europe. However, it is also in this area that we have the high need for investments in sales-enhancing initiatives. Any scalability that we actually get out of Europe goes towards funding the investments that we're making in the business.
Admin, yes, there is a high scalability. There is absolutely no reason why our admin costs should increase by the same percentage as our revenue. We are at a fairly low level already at the 4.5 percentage points of revenue, so it's not really going to have a meaningful impact on our EBIT margin. For R&D, medium scalability, but also need to investment. When we sum that up, it actually shows a picture which says that the 0.5-1 percentage point improvement on the EBIT is mainly going to come from the gross margin. Again, those of you who were at the Capital Market Day in 2012, I know you were there, Veronica. You will all remember that that's also what I said then.
At the same time, we know that the improvement plans for our production unit are coming to an end. What is it actually that's that we're going to focus on in the production in order to deliver this half to one percentage point? I already mentioned that we believe we have quite a lot of scalability in the setup that we have, so that would be part of it. At the same time, our production unit now are focusing on becoming more efficient in the supply chain. They're focusing on becoming more efficient in the whole part of the production and in the distribution. As a small add-on, we also know that we will have decreasing amortization of the intangibles that we have acquired over the sort of past years. That was the cost of goods sold.
I also said that the scalability that we have in the distribution is going to fund the investments. That leads me to give you an overview of the investments that we've done to date. You have already heard from the team here today, how we are investing in the U.S. Ed told you about that. Kristian told you how we invested a lot in emerging markets, and then Alain also talked about our pockets of growth. Here you can see the split. Importantly, if we take the one on the left-hand side first, the investments we are making, they are going to additional sales force. The majority is going to the sales force. That is something I think you should take some comfort in, that that's actually where we are putting the money, not in various admin overhead or nice setups.
A big chunk is going to support our consumer journey that Nicolas talked about earlier on. We keep a very close eye on where we actually put the investments. If we look at it from a geographical point of view, and I think this fits very well with what Kristian talked about, all the opportunities that we have in emerging markets, they are definitely getting their share. I don't know if you recall Kristian's slide of revenue from emerging markets. That up here, and now they're getting about 60% of the investment. This shows our commitment to driving more growth out of emerging markets. Other developed markets, that's mainly the U.S., they're also getting a nice part.
Europe, whenever we see those pockets of growth and can make a good business case out of them, then we want to invest in them, because Europe is a mature market, and we are market leaders, and that also means that when we see those opportunities, then most often we will have a shorter payback and less risky investment, so we will take those as we see them. That was the distribution, and we've covered part of the profitability. The final profitability driver is the tax in our EP framework. Just a few words on that. We operate what we call a principal model in Coloplast. That means that we leave a markup in the countries where we operate, 3%-5% of whatever is necessary, and also where we have production.
Then, in effect, we take about 80% of our profits back to Denmark, where they're taxed. The tax rate in Denmark for corporation right now, it's actually just gone down to 24.5%, and will go down to 22% by 2016. I've also stated up here that it's relatively predictable. Now, what I mean by that is, two things. First of all, of course, as we sell more, for instance, in the U.S., then that does impact our tax rate eventually, because there is a higher tax rate in the U.S. Another one that's more sort of external, is that we all know that all countries now are fighting to get their fair share of transfer pricing, and that, of course, is also something that we cannot control, but we know happens to all corporations.
That tax was actually the final part of the profitability part of the EP. We now have the revenue and the profitability. We'll now go to our asset efficiency. When we look at our requirement for CapEx, they have, as you can see here, they've come down over the years from around 5.5% to now somewhere around the 4%, and the 5% came from a higher level. What that has actually meant is that we have had a number of years where our depreciations have been higher than our CapEx. That has come to an end. That's important also when you look at your modeling. That has come to an end. We now expect around the 4% CapEx. We don't expect it to fluctuate that much.
I did say that every two to three years, we do need to expand our production facilities. We can do that in two ways. We can either add a module to a place we're already in, for instance, what we're doing in Hungary right now, in Nyírbátor, we are adding a module that takes us a couple of years and has a cost of around DKK 150 million. At some point, we might also need to have a greenfield, a new place where we have built a factory. That will be more expensive, in excess of the DKK 200 million, and importantly, it will also add, but not in a big scale, but it will add another site, which will give a bit more overhead.
Again, they are relatively small amounts when you compare to our revenue, so round about the 4%. Working capital, as you can see, very stable. I'm not going to comment on that, except that we expect that to remain stable at or about the level that you see it there. Let's then go to the gearing part. You should expect us to run a business with an unleveraged balance sheet. Except, of course, if for some reason there would be a major acquisition. If that happens, we will put debt on our balance sheet. If not, you should expect that we have no debt on our balance sheet. I know that is not necessarily the most optimal capital structure in the world.
On the other hand, interest rates as they are, the tax shield that we are getting from leveraging the balance sheet is fairly limited. I also believe that we have proven that we don't necessarily need high debt to keep us disciplined about cost. We can do that without. That's how we intend to run it. That was a bit about how we intend to create value in the context of what you have heard. You've seen the plans for it. What about cash flow? With the scalable business model we have, and our focus on organic growth, you should expect high, stable cash flow. What's more, you should expect that we will continue to pay that cash flow out to investors. I see a few smiles. That's good.
That's what we intend to do, and you should think about that more or less as us paying out the free cash flow. All in all, for today, you have heard about our growth strategy. You have met the team that's going to deliver it. They have shown you or given you a glimpse into the engine room, so you know how it's going to be delivered. When we then translate that into numbers, then my conclusion, at least, is that that points towards continued value creation, stable cash returns at a pretty attractive risk profile. That ends the presentations for today.